Time Squid

If you don't know much about bouquets or the differences in wildflowers vs flowers you buy at a store: wildflowers have a very unique look to them and a bouquet of them is quite special because not only does it take extensive effort climbing up steep hills and tall grass and stinging nettles, but you need to gather them and put them in water FAST because these things will start wilting like 10-20 minutes after you cut them, especially fast in hot weather. On top of that, if you somehow manage to gather enough flowers and get them in water fast enough and nicely arranged, they have an extremely short lifespan in a vase, they were not meant to be kept indoors, you'll get usually 1-2 days out of them that's it.

But because they're very hard to gather, they have a unique look unlike what you would be able to purchase, and they last a very short amount of time, it's kinda the perfect gift to show someone you love and care about them because no money can buy them, someone will typically need to go out and do tons of work for this, and to get the arrangement to match well on top of that is almost a miracle.

So without further ado, I present my wildflower bouquet I have worked on for my whole morning (about 6 hours because my first batch wilted before I got home as I was too far away when I picked them, and one of my moms favorite wildflowers is extremely fragile, grows in small clusters, typically found on the side of cliffs. And yes I scaled these cliffs to try and harvest some but I came out with three, one of which lost all its petals when a moderate strength gust of wind hit it on my way home and another one lost two of the four petals as I was trying to arrange them before I decided to put them on a separate vase so yes I spent hours hunting fucking flowers in the wilderness in the early morning hours)

And yes she loved it and was extremely appreciative of the effort I put in to give her a meaningful gift so everyone is happy!

UPDATE: She sent a picture of them on her dining table and says they're gorgeous and she loves them!!!

And this is coming someone who is not experienced in economics at all. Yes there was a point in my life I had investment money* and had attempted to do the proper research and strategizing and while my gains were slow and eventually life happened and i needed to use that money for other things.

I'm just concerned because so many people in my universities or workplaces have honestly become gambling addicts constantly checking the stock prices and playing it off as "a side gig as a day trader" which to me sounds a lot like saying "a side gig at the slot machine". It's even worse when people are getting into crypto because there is nothing to study or research. You can keep up to date on crypto news but by the time the news breaks the prices are already plummeting especially considering a lot of the trading is done by AI bots programmed to pick up on market trends and some even evaluate news articles based on the wording and make decisions if it indicates the prices go up or down (you can't beat a bot to a news story and sell your assets, bots may sometimes make an incorrect judgement but they're actually quite accurate in terms of they will typically always generate more income than loss if they are advanced enough and have access to accurate publicly released data the second it first is announced)

So you got all these people who don't have "extra" money to invest trying to get rich quick and most of them will end up losing money in the stock market which is dominated by hedge funds funded by the ultra-wealthy. It's a scheme to extract every last penny from the lower classes and then keep it in circulation among the upper class via a "publicly available" market that you either need to be exceptionally intelligent and spend all your time on it (might as well go to school and be an official stock broker at that point, get paid to play with OTHER peoples money AND stay in the know so you can invest your own on the side) or you need to be exceptionally wealthy to hire intelligent people to either do it for me or build an AI that does it with an acceptable margin of error.

And it kinda sucks cause when you mention this to those people they are so convinced they're different this isn't gambling "it's called day trading it's a respectable and productive thing to do" and you're just a conspiracy theorist and you're missing out on making soooooo much money right now they just made $1000 over the weekend. And then two weeks later they're depressed and talking about losing 90% of everything because they were losing and tried to recoup their losses and everything collapsed and now they don't know how they're gonna pay rent. Another month and they're bragging about making so much money again and it's just aggravating that these people don't see they're stuck in a gambling addiction and are being told not to worry it's not gambling, it's day trading. And the rich laugh their asses off as some bots swoop in to rake in the money the Poors™️ lost in their specially designed slot machine that only favors them and keeps everyone else hooked enough that they keep doing it without realizing they're slowly being drained.

If you don't know much about bouquets or the differences in wildflowers vs flowers you buy at a store: wildflowers have a very unique look to them and a bouquet of them is quite special because not only does it take extensive effort climbing up steep hills and tall grass and stinging nettles, but you need to gather them and put them in water FAST because these things will start wilting like 10-20 minutes after you cut them, especially fast in hot weather. On top of that, if you somehow manage to gather enough flowers and get them in water fast enough and nicely arranged, they have an extremely short lifespan in a vase, they were not meant to be kept indoors, you'll get usually 1-2 days out of them that's it.

But because they're very hard to gather, they have a unique look unlike what you would be able to purchase, and they last a very short amount of time, it's kinda the perfect gift to show someone you love and care about them because no money can buy them, someone will typically need to go out and do tons of work for this, and to get the arrangement to match well on top of that is almost a miracle.

So without further ado, I present my wildflower bouquet I have worked on for my whole morning (about 6 hours because my first batch wilted before I got home as I was too far away when I picked them, and one of my moms favorite wildflowers is extremely fragile, grows in small clusters, typically found on the side of cliffs. And yes I scaled these cliffs to try and harvest some but I came out with three, one of which lost all its petals when a moderate strength gust of wind hit it on my way home and another one lost two of the four petals as I was trying to arrange them before I decided to put them on a separate vase so yes I spent hours hunting fucking flowers in the wilderness in the early morning hours)

And yes she loved it and was extremely appreciative of the effort I put in to give her a meaningful gift so everyone is happy!

UPDATE: She sent a picture of them on her dining table and says they're gorgeous and she loves them!!!

"you look great!" - normal. Anyone could say this. Could be true or could just be lying to be nice. Very normal expected thing to say to someone

He didn't do it.

The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.

Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?

I have never seen Monty Python And The Holy Grail, or hell any Monty Python in general.

I don’t know what this means.