the-potato-beeper

[the-potato-beeper]

my three favorite things are the oxford comma, irony, and missed opportunities

[the-potato-beeper]

i'm getting really into Murderbot again as i reread the series, and i've started Rotating a comparison between that and ORV in my brain

[the-potato-beeper]

$20 used to mean something

[the-potato-beeper]

im thinking about getting everything in my whole life sorted tomorrow maybe

[the-potato-beeper]

quite possibly most hilariously vile thing to put in a rejection letter. thank god i dont care about this school bc this is so fucking funny

[the-potato-beeper]

(second century warlord making a joke at the expense of those who lived in the past) first day as a first century warlord: i can’t write anything down cause paper hasn’t been invented yet

[the-potato-beeper]

👏 how 👏 many 👏 shrimps 👏 do 👏 you 👏 hgave 👏 to 👏 eat

👏 before 👏 you 👏 srimps 👏 flimp 👏 geep

👏 eeb 👏 ko 👏 freeg 👏 nan 👏 zo 👏 big 👏 zig

👏 shrimps 👏 are 👏 made 👏 of 👏 shrimp

[the-potato-beeper]

*in the middle of a breakdown* Omg wait. this is just like the character

[the-potato-beeper]

Honestly it boils down to reparenting yourself & rewiring your own neuronal pathways & telling yourself a firm “stop” when you notice your mind slipping down negative loopholes & being present in the moment & enjoying being mid task rather than waiting for it to end & not thinking of inertia as your baseline and natural way of living

[the-potato-beeper]

poking at Ur hand with my nose to get you to pet me

[the-potato-beeper]

art theft isnt what it used to be. now you can just right click save. you used to have to break into a museum. there were lasers and stuff. you don't even have to have a grappling hook anymore.

[the-potato-beeper]

I love Stardew Valley, it's such a comfortable game to play, but the plot feels a little light at times. I bet it would be more compelling if the farmer had amnesia, crippling substance dependence and was suffering so much mental degradation that he thought his clothes were speaking to him.

[the-potato-beeper]

beautiful women named extreme heat warning keep blowing up my phone

[the-potato-beeper]

people who find it easy to do things have no idea how hard it is to do things

[the-potato-beeper]

Ignoring the magically appearing tents and various creature comforts, which we probably didn't aquire 'til encountering a market settlement, probably Scornubel, or some of it looted the loot that the goblins had taken from passing merchant caravans:

I doubt the illithid bothered to keep or return any possessions anyone in the party did not already have on their person when they were taken. Shadowheart's comfy slippers and all that incence she's got lying around probably needed buying; does Gale even have his spellbook on him? Is he in any way dressed for the woods? Astarion sure as hells isn't dressed for anywhere non-urban, probably expect his shoes to come off in the mud and for them to get horribly damaged within the first month and constant patching of carefully preserved 200 year old finery with no end of complaining.

Then there's Durge who, contrary to the equipment list, comes out drenched in blood which is probably partially layers of 20+ days worth of the stuff that comes from them and whoever got mauled trying to put them in that pod. I'm impressed they have clothes.

And because this always bothers me, Wyll, where the fuck did you find that gold abacus? It looks expensive, did we find it or did we spend a lot of party gold on that? And Lae'zel found a whole damn grinder because a simple whetstone will not suffice? Gale went out and got a a fucking telescope. Most of these guys seem to have expensive taste tbh. Never take them on a shopping trip. We probably walked out of Scornubel with a mule and cart because I'm failing to see how we're bringing this along unless Halsin is alive and we're using a bear as a pack mule.

The camp book club is mostly founded on theft/'finders keepers' using literally any book we can find. A lot of it is non-fiction and a bit dry, but at least it's not Volo. We continue to comfort ourselves with this knowledge, out loud, while Volo is in the party.

[the-potato-beeper]

it really is fascinating how online communities will identify a problem, and then create an entirely new problem by morphing and deforming the point through telephone until the context is scrubbed clean in favor of the warning.

you'll have "DON'T drink pepsi outside in oklahoma because then you'll attract the Oklahoma Pepsi Mangler," and then it'll exchange hands so many times that in a few months you'll be getting called out for drinking pepsi in spain as if it was the pepsi that was the problem and not The Mangler.

but everybody remembers that the warning was important without understanding the context behind it, so you'll hear about how awful drinking pepsi is forever

[the-potato-beeper]

In the late 1970s a glowing orb appeared in the sky. Every day at about 5:00 Greenwich standard time, the orb would go somewhere new, shoot out something similar to a laser, and kill one person. Every day, always at the same time, always exactly one person.

The person killed by the orb seemed completely random, with almost fifty years of studying it we've been able to find no rhythm or reason to who it kills. It kills the old, the young, the rich, the poor, the urban, the rural, anyone. Every human on earth seems to have an equal chance of being killed by the orb. It's a headline the few times someone of note is killed by the orb: Britain famously lost a Parliament member to the orb, Brazil to this day remains the only country where a head of state was killed by the orb while in office, there was a short lived sitcom in the 1990s called Friends that ended halfway through its first season due to the orb killing one of the main actors on set. However, these are outliers, on any given day the person who dies via orb is very likely to be someone you never heard of. There are billions of people on earth, and only one is killed by the orb every day. In almost fifty years only a little over 18000 have died because of the orb, which is nothing in the face of the sheer amount of humans that exist.

When the orb first appeared people were horrified. Both the US and USSR thought it was a weapon from the other side. Almost every religion made some claim of it being proof of their beliefs, oftentimes claiming it was divine punishment. Atheists claimed it was proof no loving God could exist. People were so very apocalyptic and horrified by it, they thought of it as part of the end times, because when it was new that's really how it looked.

However, it's been long enough so that's changed. Most people have lived their entire lives in a world where the orb exists. The orb isn't that scary a concept. People know their odds of being killed by it are low and that it's not going to end the world or anything. The orb has become normal, and we've accepted that the orb is just something that kills people the same way cancer, or heart attacks, or natrual disasters, or car crashes kill people. In the nineteen eighties there were efforts to find a way to stop the orb, but it's since proven to be extremely difficult, and it's as distant and nebulous as finding a cure for cancer. When a community is struck by the orb you'll see that community in mourning, but it's not a global thing anymore.

So people grow up learning about the orb, as part of science, like anything else. A lot of gen z remembers learning about the orb from Magic School Bus. It's just something normal. There are a few people with an orb hyperfixation, and a few cults that give the orb importance but it's not most people's concern. The orb is how we first confirmed that interdimensional objects existed and are possible. A lot of people theorize dimensional studies wouldn't exist without it, meaning without the orb we might not have thermitizers or grand drives, we might not even have a moon base without the orb. Some have even rather tastelessly claimed that the orb has saved more lives at this point than its taken with all the knowledge it's given us.

Which is why I regret to inform you, that just last week, without warning, the orb killed two people in one day. And for the past seven days it's been killing two people instead of just one. Nobody knows why.