the horror persists, but so do i

"Grace refuses to add the swears to the vocabulary" WRONG! Rocky refuses to add the swears to the vocabulary. Grace (book!Grace, at least) is in his thirties. It's like a four-year-old baby by the Eridian standards. Rocky is not teaching the baby the swears, it would be so irresponsible!!

[ID: Reply from elumind that says: “Do the richest one every week and see next in line lose their shit and try to get rid of the money. I think of this almost daily.” /end ID.]

The first one stands up and draws a massive A on the nearest wall before dropping dead. 

Like most of us I’ve thought extensively on this since I first saw Death Note and came to the conclusion that the most likely reaction would be people creating more byzantine ways of keeping hold of their resources while not technically counting them as personal resources and not technically being so rich. With enough shell companies, fake charities, and resources stashed in secret or illegal places or the bank accounts of relatives, people could keep most of what they have while dropping right off any list of wealthiest people. The wealthy are often experts at this for tax fraud reasons. Light’s response, of course, would be to start taking these things into account, seeking out hackers and accountants and various other experts to keep track of the actual wealthiest, and the wealthy (many of whom would be willing to risk their lives to stay that way) would use the dying as a metric for what the mysterious killer was using to score wealth and try to find ever more secret methods of resource hoarding. An accountancy arms race would be underway.

Other people have touched on this more eloquently, but I love that Ryland Grace is at his core a teacher. A middle school science teacher. Sure, his background as a former academic is also critical to the story, mostly because something about him needed to catch Stratt's eye and thus result in him getting dragged into the project, but more importantly than that, he hated being in academia. The book makes it fairly explicit that he wrote his controversial paper and insulted a leading scientist in his field because he was burnt out and hated the environment and got self-destructive as a result, which is a far less rosy view of academic science than I would have expected (and, frankly, completely believable).

I tried my hand at one of those two-column (contrapuntal) poems! I have a new level of respect for anyone who writes these lol