A bell is a cup until it is struck

thinking about chapter 9 of why time begins on opening day by thomas boswell again

in the pale moonlight I stand lone and bloodied. I look sick as fuck and you wish you were me

but ykw at least i'm not on mount everest. at least i'm not paying tens of thousands of dollars to slowly suffocate in a 300-person line at the gates of hell. never in my life will i have to be steered in a hypoxic stupor through the maze of poop and corpses atop mount everest. on this earth a lot of horrible things can happen to you without your permission but there are a few that you have to opt into. you can just say no thanks! and be guaranteed never to have to be on mount everest. much to be grateful for actually

still not on mount everest this morning 😌 alhamdulillah

some people really do need to start reminding themselves that the answer to "why didn't the character just do [something entirely different]" is often simply "because then there wouldn't be a story"

I still think about the YT reviewer complaining that with all of space, a malfunctioning spaceship had to crash on Earth, and thinking "Well, the first step to get Alien:Earth is to have the Alien arrive on Earth"