The Grove

His majesty's castle is stuck doing a barrel roll. Rescue operations are on the way.

Unfortunately, the sky island rescue department has had their budget cut by half by his majesty's treasurer to invest in automation and are now limited in both staff and equipment.

Make her shorter if you must

Make them exactly the same size and shape but different colors

Give him a huge flock of babies following him around to show off what a great lay he is

Surprise mPreganté

Exactly the same but one of them has a cool hat (you decide which)

Give her a sensible haircut for successful hunting while he has a big dumb mullet so big and dumb the food can see him coming and book it

Roses come in almost every color except blue (and black). We've worked very hard to breed all sorts of roses: climbers, shrubs, long-stem, tea roses, scented, and on and on. But in true human fashion, we want the one we don't have, and that's a blue rose. A true blue rose. We can't get them naturally, roses don't carry the gene(s) necessary to be bred blue on their own.

So of course, when genetic modification became real, one of the first projects started, and in fact still ongoing, is to create a blue rose. Efforts have been ongoing for about forty-something years now, and not from small labs. The first one to the finish line will have the patent on the color [yes, rose colors are patented] and the process. They will make money hand over fist. Not to mention the progress it will represent in the entire field.

40+ years.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A photo depicting a smiling Japanese woman with two large bouquets of Suntory's "Applause" roses, which are a lavender-grey color]

Closest we've gotten. And these make money, don't get me wrong. They're beautiful. But they're purple. Lavender. Technically blue, in the sense that "purple" doesn't exist in horticulture. (Thus why in the rhyme, "violets are blue")

"But when I put 'blue roses' in a search engine -"

Those are either photoshopped, or they're white roses that have been dyed blue. It's a really easy process. Florists do it all the time for specialty requests. It's so commonly done it even comes in spray paint form. They don't grow that color. They cannot grow that color.

(Yes, whatever one you think is real is photoshopped or dyed. Yes, I'm sure.)

All that work, from some of the best labs in the world. Decades of work. Absolute dedication to the task, the science needed being created just to do this, this one thing, make a rose blue. And we still can't do it.

Screenshot of a post on Threads by "ztwang87". The post reads:

A techbro told me that biology is easy because DNA is just code, right? I told him that DNA is 4 billion year old, completely undocumented, vibe-coded spaghetti, built by a blind evolutionary algorithm, which codes for its own compiler and runtime environment. His confidence popped like a balloon. I think of that programmer investigating Team Fortress 2, who found a jpg of a coconut in the game files and has no idea what it's doing there but if you remove it the game doesn't start. Biology is full of coconuts

End ID.]

Zuko: where did you even find toph?

Sokka: oh we ran into her while she was a pro wrestling champion

Zuko: .. that twelve yr old blind girl was a what now??

~

Zuko: you said you tried firebending before? Who taught you?

Aang: this strange guy called jeong jeong who lived in a forest

Zuko, who grew up in the firenation and probably heard all about this man: THE DESERTER??

Aang: ya how’d you know??

~

Aang: you know what’s strange? Zhao seemed to just disappear after the north pole... I wonder what happened?

Zuko: oh he’s dead

Aang: w-what?

Zuko: yea. Watched him drown too. A big grabby hand got him and dragged him into the ocean

Aang: .... *crying*

~

Zuko: so what did you guys do while hiding in the fire nation?

Aang: oh not much tbh, I went to school for like two days, Katara and I blew up a factory, we cleaned a river, Toph scammed a whole town, Katara learned bloodbending and I went to therapy

Zuko:

Snapping turtle geese and Alligator snapping turtle swans. Zuko hired them as his new gaurds. He loves them and there has not been an attempt on his life since.

Turtle goose to do list:

Sunbathe on favorite rock

Break into kitchen

Steal single pancake from the kitchen

Jump out of the water and surprise funny water tribe man

Help tiny earthbender destroy rocks and statues of ozai

Harass noblemen the firelord doesn't like

Pretend to be turtle duck for more free food

Interup same noblemen during counsil meeting

Go to ozai's prison cell and honk at him with turtle swan

Beg servents for fire flakes

Honk at all the firelord portraits that aren't zuko's

Add more bite marks to ozai's

Steal dinner bell

Ring dinner bell all the way to dining hall

Patrol hallways at night

Drag assailant into pond

Steal all his clothing

Then, after Zuko joins the Gaang, Sokka mentions that he mentioned it to Azula and she reacted weird.

Zuko: You just found your future wife.

Sokka: WHAT!

Zuko: You are good looking, smart, and that incident proved your audacity and cunning.

Sokka: But-

Zuko: If it's about the woman named Suki, Azula says that being in line for the throne means she has the duty of having multiple spouses, both for heirs and relaxing, and she doesn't want unnecessary conflicts.

Sokka:*faints

Katara: That was a joke, right?

Aang: No, no, that fits their culture.

We all know Halloween by now which takes place during autumn and is said to when the veil between life and death is the thinnest.

In Britain winter, especially Christmas time, is considered spooky and a time for ghost stories which is why British shows always have a spooky Christmas episode and why A Christmas Carol has ghosts in 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.

Even just on the level of messaging, compare “Freedom House Ambulance Service” vs “Defund the Police”. One sounds like it’s about freedom, it’s about providing, it’s a service. The other frames itself as defunding, taking away infrastructure that—whether you personally agree or not—people broadly view as a service. There is nothing about “Defund the Police” or “ACAB” etc. (whose underlying critiques I broadly agree with) that intuitively suggests to anyone hearing it for the first time that what we’re suggesting is reallocating funds to empower and provide a better, safer, demilitarized kind of infrastructure. It’s just “get rid of this thing that most people feel like they need”.

We find THE most dystopian, tear-it-all-down, shockjock asshole-sounding ways to express a point & then spend so much time defending that choice & explaining “no no actually it’s really sensible” (often with an air of superiority, as if to say “you’re so stupid for thinking the dystopian-sounding thing i said isn’t actually dystopian”) that we never seem to get around to do the damn thing. rather than notice that we’re alienating our allies & learn from this, we just dig our heels in & refuse to adjust.

Why can’t we just say what we mean? Demilitarize the Police. Fund Welfare. Reallocate City Funds. Provide Social Services. If you don’t want to sound like you’re trying to strip apart societal infrastructure you don’t have to! If you’re trying to communicate that you’re trying to provide a service… you can just say that up front. We don’t have to marry ourselves to the **ABOLISH** ** DESTROY** **SMASH** **DEFUND** framing.

But it’s not just PR or tone or whatever.

FHAS also didn’t wait for permission or demand to get rid of the police-run ambulance first; they saw where the police-run ambulance was lacking and they filled the gap themselves. they they provided a solution. the only reason they got the trust & funding from the city government in the first place was by proving they could do it better.

also, as much as this story may illustrate an example of fixing the system from outside it, it still required cooperation with & working alongside the pre-existing system. they used donated police vehicles. the police called them in to help. they didn’t say “fuck the system” wholesale, burn it to the ground, & make something better in the ashes. they sprang up from the community, ensured their quality of service was better, & offered their help.

A visual physics lesson at 80 km/h.

Enthusiasts launched a man from a moving truck in the opposite direction - at the same speed the car was traveling.

spectacularly showed how

relative speed works