chaos is peace

We're having our turn in the heat wave and reports from the National Mall are brutal already this week. That screenshot is today's forecast (courtesy of the Capital Weather Gang) and tomorrow and Saturday are confidently going to be worse than this is.

The national Mall has no shade on the grass and you will be exposed to the sun constantly while also experiencing extremely high humidity. You will not be allowed a bag over a certain size to enter the mall and it has to be clear. You cannot have an insulated water bottle, it has to be clear. Reports are that there are two entrances to the area so you'll have to wait in line to even get in. I cannot find a number on how many cooling stations there are, except that it's "few" to "none" depending on what accounts I read online. Vendors are allegedly charging more than the posted prices and seem to be unprepared for actual crowds - these are the official vendors not the scam food trucks that park all around the edges of the mall. And that's the extent of the planning done because it was not a priority to make sure attendees don't pass out.

My local friends and I have reached a consensus that tourists are going to get extremely sick and none of us know what the EMT response or planning is on the mall this year. People are going to die.

Hating women? Those manosphere guys are never going to be happy as long as they hate women.

Hating men? Same. Hating the patriarchy does not mean hating men, and hating men will never make you happy.

TERFs? They're fucking miserable. Hating trans people will never make you happy.

Hating kids? Boomers? Billionaires (yeah, this one hurts)? Politicians? People writing fanfiction "wrong"? It's never gonna make you happy.

And my manager was like no!!!! If that happened, I would drive to find you guys in my truck and we could eat stuff from my wife's garden and I would make sure everyone I know survived!! I would carry you all on my shoulders away from the zombies!!

So the other two in my group are used to my antics by now. We’re all friends, so the pair of them decide that the one guy in our group gets to be the nurse. Now, my Juliet and I have been friends for a couple months by this point, so I decide to be a little more dramatic.

We put Juliet on a spinny chair, and pump it up as tall as it goes, and my baby, closeted lesbian ass crouches on the floor, ready to be as melodramatic as possible. Like, I’m about to do a rendition that makes William himself walk into the class and tell me to take it back a notch or twelve.

And then I look up.

And holy shit.

There she is, Juliet, haloed in the worst fluorescent light known to mortals across the globe. Light just streaming down around her, that weird off-green colour that it always is. And she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. My little gay soul is barely holding on as the words barely leave my lips, breathlessly. “But soft… what light from yonder window breaks?”

And Juliet was the sun. Romeo was not exaggerating that line at all.

matcha originated in China about 1200 years ago, açaí has been consumed by Indigenous communities in the Amazon for centuries, and Dubai chocolate was invented by combining chocolate with knafeh, an 1100 year old SWANA snack.

white people love to call nonwhite foods suddenly becoming popular in western mainstream culture "industry plants" as if they haven't always existed.

Tags passing peer review, gonna share.