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At least I can be a maggot clinging onto its corpse.

Blessed are the maggots; but the fungi shall inherit the earth.  Therefore seek thou to become as the mushroom, which bringeth forth life out of decay.

A corpse...should be left well alone.

[Day 1.]

Mom saw something in the garden.  Big, she says, with a flat tail.  She's worried it's a rat.  It's not.  It's a ground-squirrel.  Fucking colonists.

My attention is drawn to a burrow in the neighbour's garden box; a squirrel pops up its head and peeps at me.  The neighbour has covered some of her plants with plastic bottles, to protect them.  Another neighbour--a "handyman"--apparently suggests pouring vinegar down the hole.  What an idiot.

Rat traps are too small for squirrels, so I make a trip to Cabela's, and buy a #0 Victor Longspring.  It doesn't come with instructions.  It doesn't need them.

Outside, behind the garage, there's a group of little ones playing.  Four of them.  They're adorable, almost unbearably cute.  I feel bad about what's going to happen.  But it's them or me.

Day 1.

I set the trap near the back of the garage, with peanut butter on the trigger, and a couple almonds within the trap, for good measure.

One of the little ones dies of a broken neck.  They're not so cute when they're dead; the rodent teeth and squinty eyes make them look more rat-like.

Reset.

Within half an hour, another is dead.  An adult, this time.  Fractured skull.

A couple hours pass, with no further activity.  Have they smartened up?  But no--there's a little face looking at me from a gap below the neighbour's fence.  I move the trap there.

Reset.

The third squirrel, another juvenile, survives--at first.   It's caught by a leg, desperately trying to get away; but, this trap comes with a chain for a reason.  The chain is staked firmly to the ground.

I don't want to do this.  I didn't sign up for this.  I like squirrels.  But.

I get a crowbar from the garage, and pull on the trap chain with my free hand, dragging the squirrel out from under the fence.

It doesn't die with the first hit.

I hit it again, twice...and then stop.  I really want it to be dead, to be done with this, but I don't want squirrel guts splattered everywhere, either.

It stops moving.  The corpse is disposed of; the blood is washed from the crowbar.

A crowbar isn't naturally a great weapon, regardless of what the videogames might make you think, I reflect.  Or maybe killing with a blunt instrument is a skill I just don't have yet.

Yet?

I feel sick.  I'll get over it.

Day 2.

I set the trap by the fence again.  The trap goes off almost immediately...and I see a squirrel escaping.  Drat.

Reset.

The trap snaps again...but it's just a mouse this time.  A Victor #0 is not a suitable trap for capturing mice.  It's almost been bisected, but it's still quivering.  A squirrel peeps out from under the fence, watching.  Bastard.

I chuck the mouse in the back alley.  The corvids can deal with it.

Reset.

I'm going back to check the trap again, when there's a sudden flurry of activity.  Please, not another survivor, I think to myself.  But the activity soon ceases.  This one is caught by the head.  It's still breathing erratically, but...not for very long.  I hear its final breath, sort of a hiss.

Reset.

I've seen one adult, and four pups, and killed four squirrels so far.  There's probably only one left.  Is it smart enough to leave?

No.

No, it's not.

This one survives, too; again, caught by a leg.  This time, I get an axe.  Mom tells me to use the blunt end---but as I approach, the squirrel curls into the trap frame, so I can't hit it without damaging the trap.

After a brief conference, Mom brings me a wide-mouth glass jar, one that she uses to clean paint brushes in.  I lift the trapped squirrel up via the trap-chain, lower it into the jar, and then fill the jar with rainwater.

It takes the squirrel a long time to drown.  Even after a few minutes, it's still twitching sporadically, and I don't want anyone getting bitten, so I wait.

Eventually, it stops.

I've killed five squirrels in two days.  I am not a natural killer.  But the nausea will pass.

Reset.

 

That was beautiful.

My employer launched an internal-use AI chat bot, to some fanfare.  In practice, it just repeats email sent from the IT department's ticket system, and fails miserably as a search engine.  ELIZA was smarter.

A co-worker, as an experiment, decided to use the chat-bot to accomplish one of the example tasks it was supposed to be able to help with:  Request a new mouse from IT.

There was confusion, and hilarity, and an point when he was told his mouse was ready for pickup at the head office on the other side of the country.  He finally got his mouse over a month later.

That whole second point was oafish.

Yeah, it kinda was.  Bordering on racist, even.  Truth is, I have russian ancestry, and a russian last name, and I have this lurking paranoia that someone's going to take me to task over the war because of it.

Doubting everything russian, as irrational as it is, seems to be one way I'm trying to distance myself, to prove to myself that I'm not like them.

A therapist would probably have a lot of fun with the above.

My book is very quack-like.
To answer about attainment, I thought that Principia Discordia encouraged "translations" (but I cannot find where it says that).

We don't take the book very seriously around here.  I mean, it also encourages people to eat their own noses.

To answer about russian language - it's one of the languages I speak

But russian isn't spoken here.  You are apparently quite fluent in English.  You would get a larger audience if you posted something in that--although regrettably, you would probably still not break single-digits.  There aren't many of us left.

do I really need to "defend" myself by saying I'm Ukrainian?

Not particularly, it's enough to be a human being.

In any case. I wrote a book that I felt was discordian-like. That's it.

That, at least, makes sense.

Using the word "quantum" when one isn't actually talking about particle physics raises a warning flag.  It usually signifies quackery or pinealism.

Starting one's forum career by a double-posting a link to a russian-language page, when the russians are currently international pariahs, is another problem.  It seems one can't turn a rock over these days without a pro-Putin fascist scurrying out.

Especially odd, is posting such a link when russian is very obviously not a language in usage here.  What are you hoping to attain?

the names of the boards dont actually make sense. it took me a good half an hour of scrolling to figure out what this board does. i still dont understand

This board used to be "Apple Talk", but then the apple melted--as apples will--and now all that's left is sand and blood.

Read the inscription on the pedestal--if you can find it, under all that sand.

If you don't like TikTok, then stop visiting it.

I don't, but I think the trend it set (the hyper-aggressive algorithm) is just something that's everywhere now

Everywhere?  I hardly see that anywhere.

But I have a preternatural talent for triggering obscure bugs in computer programs (I crashed ChatGPT the first time I tried to use it) so maybe these algorithms are just avoiding me out of fear.

No, I just hate that TikTok has the worst fucking algorithm and I hate the idea of every aspect of internet culture being forced to shed itself of individuality because everything must be advertiser friendly and presentable.

If you don't like TikTok, then stop visiting it.

Fall 2022 I had far too many apples to deal with, so I tried making cider.
That turned out well; but fall 2023 the tree gave me almost nothing, so I decided to try making mead instead, and use up the nanking cherries.

My traditional mead (made mostly for the learning experience) is almost three months old, I'm just waiting for it to clarify.  After the second racking, I think I've got too much headspace in the carboys;  hopefully it won't oxidize, but time will tell.

I have a two-month-old nanking cherry melomel near the end of primary fermentation (starting to stall at 14.9% ABV).  I'll apply what I learned with the trad and try to manage headspace better, and maybe add sulfites to keep the spectre of oxidization at bay.

My mistake with the melomel was not putting the fruit in a bag.  I now have a bucket with three gallons of pulpy melomel, with floaty bits on top, and fruit sludge on the bottom.  Racking this without plugging the siphon is going to be interesting.

As with gardening, brewing is slow.  It takes weeks and months to discover one's mistakes.

What does it mean to be discordian?

What does it mean, when anyone can attach the label to themselves, and, like the christians, anyone else can just as easily say they're not a real discordian?

What does it mean if I can look at someone who's never heard of discordianism, and recognize that they reflect my own discordian ideal, that they're discordian without knowing it?

What does it mean if, when I meet someone calling themselves discordian, discover they're close-minded, bigoted, incapable of introspection, an otherwise horrible specimen of humanity, and yet I must nevertheless acknowledge that they're still undoubtedly, unquestionably a discordian?

It means nothing.  Discordianism is just another trap.  You stick a label on yourself, pretend that it changes something, and now you're one of the Enlightened Few.  You acknowledge the parable of the barstool, but you don't really believe in it; it's just a story.  You've got this.  You know how it all works, now.

Hail Eris.

I tried to read it, but gave up after two paragraphs.

Perhaps there is a funny story buried under all that purple prose, but the author evidently confused a thesaurus for a style guide.

Write your messages on toilet paper in public bathrooms instead.

You won't waste paper, you'll reach a wider audience, and your words will be delivered to the end they deserve.

My last post in this ridiculous thread (yaaa):


Good Morning Spectators! Today we will be taking the following phrase -

"The original poster of this thread, and others like them, are literally in fear for their lives, some having difficulty with day-to-day survival,..." (thank you cno for supplying this)

- and having 2 widely different groups duke it out and see which group this phrase REALLY should apply to. Winner gets the Title and Belt.

[snip]

You put a lot of text into that straw man.  I skimmed past most of it, I've had enough of Ayn Rand's form of didacticism to last a lifetime.

You're exactly the kind of person who, in the early 1930s in Germany, would have been saying "See, the Jews don't have it so bad!" while sitting in your comfortable armchair, enjoying the fruits of nascent fascism.

Funny thing?  You were wrong.  I don't browse twitter or facebook.  And my chair is actually pretty comfortable.  But when people say they're in trouble, I don't use my privilege to mock them and tell them it's not so bad.

I try listening first.