Cody had nine cups of coffee that morning, and was vibrating into the fourth dimension so he stopped listening after “execute order six-” order six, CANONICALLY, is “get rid of your communicator as fast as possible”. So that’s what Cody hears, and that’s what Cody relays to the GAR. So Palpatine executes his master stroke and six million clones just YEET their communicators and keep going about their business.
gather round, folks, that i may pass down the tale of Fuck-It Jonn, because that dude is just the GREATEST FUCKING CONMAN in the WORLD, and he WASN’T EVEN TRYING. he absolutely fucking STUMBLED ON ACCIDENT into THE SCAM THAT WOULD DEFINE HIS ENTIRE LIFE. the lie that transformed his ENTIRE EXISTENCE out of SHEER RANDOM BULLSHIT.
and his sole motivation was to EAT FINGER FOOD.
consider:
in the Wayback Days™ before i was born, the people who would later become my parents had this friend named… yeah, let’s say jonn. i’d rather not say his real name. bitches not snitches, and all that.
so. france in the late 80s. jonn and my parents had just finished school and all found jobs in computer engineering. (not that they STUDIED computer engineering, mind you. no, they were all studying how to become fish farmers or some shit. but those were simpler times, when knowing how to turn the fucking screen on got you a comfortable salary at the ripe old age of 24 years old.)
except that jonn, who was a chill hippie kind of dude, was bored to death by his desk job. so bored that he decided to just up and quit. “fuck it”, was basically jonn’s motto. fuck it, he’d find something better! fuck it, and things would work out! EXCEPT (as you may have guessed) THEY DIDN’T. for months and months he didn’t find another job. and so he ended up depressed, struggling, and eating dinner at my future-parents’ tiny apartment, three times a week, so he wouldn’t literally starve.
time went by. jonn was still unemployed. so before his resources hit rock bottom, jonn did the only logical, reasonable thing. what’s that, you ask? begged for his old job back? went back to school? crawled home to his parents? ha ha! obviously you do not share jonn’s ADVENTUROUS AND ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT. and also you lack his BIZARRE LOGIC AND PLAIN WEIRD APPROACH TO LIFE.
what jonn did was: say “fuck it” (again) and leave for thailand.
because you see, thailand was cheap by french standards. so cheap that even a penniless dude on unemployment could live there for weeks on end, spending much less than he would have in france, as long as he didn’t mind roughing it. and jonn didn’t mind! “fuck it”, he’d said. and by god, he would stand by his words!
so jonn gamely scrounged up the money for the plane ticket and then… yeah. basically bummed it out in thailand. for two months. seeing the sights. sleeping on the street. making new friends.
and one of these news friends turned out to be very adept at FORGING PAPERS.
huh, jonn said to himself (probably high at the time) this sounds not at all shifty and more like a ONCE IN A LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY; what could POSSIBLY GO WRONG. my new thai best friend is even offering me a FAMILY DISCOUNT. for fake papers. fuck it! let’s have some!
as far as i can tell, jonn… didn’t even need fake papers?? like, he was literally just trying not to pass up on an opportunity here. so he smoked some more weed (i can only assume) and got A BRILLIANT IDEA. fake ID card? LAME. fake driver’s licence? HACKNEYED. fake medical degree? PEDESTRIAN. no! jonn got himself a fake press card.
but why??
well, OBVIOUSLY, just so he could get into cultural events for free – conferences, art premieres, etc – and eat all the finger food. that was his grand plan. stroll into press-only events, wave his poorly-made card around, and gorge himself on canapés. no more going hungry! ever! jonn would live off tiny slices of toasted foie gras and flutes of cheap champagne for the rest of his life!
so now jonn, Very Obviously Fake Journalist™, is back in france and he’s DOING THE THING. and guess what? this was before google. before facebook. before linkedin. impersonating a journalist was very easy. if people asked where you worked you just said you were freelance, then steered the conversation to current politics and stealthily devoured the entire buffet while everybody was busy debating.
and so. this is what jonn is doing. his monumentally stupid plan is actually working. this is how he eats. with thai-made fake papers and sheer fucking confidence. and of course people start noticing him eventually! jonn is always fucking there! at all and any events in paris! because, again, THIS IS HOW HE EATS! but it’s always the same people running around in these circles, anyway. so nobody’s surprised to see the same dudes popping up over and over again. jonn blends in! and jonn is very good at making friends. and changing the subject. and eating canapés.
and then ONE DAY
one of jonn’s newfangled journalist friends (a REAL journalist, mind you, who has NO IDEA that jonn isn’t What He Seems) basically goes: “dude i’m so swamped rn. everyone wants everything all at once. fuck. shit. are you swamped too?”
“oh, for sure,” jonn says through a mouthful of his twenty-ninth serving of canapés that night. “not a second to myself”
“god. fuck. tell me about it. shit. i’m just so damn swamped.” Real Journalist shakes his head. “if i could only find someone to cover for me on this one article.”
now, i know i said before that jonn was smoking weed. but i must confess now i said it for humorous effect. i have no idea if jonn’s ever been within five hundred yards of a blunt his whole life. but what you must understand is that jonn is Chill™ on like. a soul-deep level. his whole mind is one long exhale of smoke followed by the words “fuck it”. this is a man who left his job for no reason, lived in thailand on a tourist’s visa for two months, got fake papers there for the lol of it all, and is now living off press-only events in paris. jonn was BORN HIGH.
SO. when RJ asks him: “dude. jonn. you said you were working freelance. i know you’re busy but don’t you think you could maybe cover for me? just this once?”
jonn NATURALLY answers: “fuck it. sure”
then goes to an unemployment center and applies for one of their free one-week classes. on journalism. jonn spends ALL OF ONE WEEK learning How To Write An Article Like A Real Journalist With A Real Press Card. then writes the article. basically bullshitting his way through that thing. half-assing the life out of it. faking his heart out. because why not? FUCK IT.
i have NO IDEA if he actually did a good job or not. but it was in fact good enough for RJ who really must have been truly swamped, and was so truly grateful that he told all of their mutual journalists friends. who were ALL SWAMPED. i’m given to understand it’s the natural state of the journalist in the wild.
and so jonn is now REGULARLY COVERING FOR ALL SORTS OF JOURNALISTS.
not making much money i assume. but still, not bad for a dude who studied journalism for five whole days.
and well, it’s kinda fun! better than moping around at home waiting for the next free canapé press-only premiere. so jonn keeps at it. and eventually it occurs to him that hey! he spent two months in thailand. why not make an article out of that? so he writes himself a lil paper, retelling his Bumtastic Adventures in the Land of Thai People, Cheap Living and Forged Papers (That Last One Having Nothing to Do With Him Personally of Course). and he’s kinda proud of it. so much that he gives it to his journalist friends. can they maybe pass it around? see if anybody would be interested in publishing it? for a modest fee and some more canapés?
and yeah. someone was in fact interested in publishing it. and that someone was:
THE
NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC
(french edition.)
so jonn got a REAL press card. got a FULL-TIME JOB at the national geographic. and spent the REST OF HIS WORK LIFE traveling abroad for six months, then going back to paris the rest of the year to write about his wacky journeys. he’s retired now, having published several books full of his articles and photographs. he’s bought a b&b in the french countryside with all his money. and continues to say “fuck it” to any problem that comes his way like the absolute fucking legend he is.
as far as i know, none of his journalist buddies nor his boss ever found out about any of this.
Hey wanna hear the most telling thing about me as a 17 year old dnd nerd
I made up a villian for a campaign that was a black dragon and his name was Oblivion of Roses.
Ok so our man Oblivion of Roses lived in a bog and pickled dead bodies in swamp water as black dragons do, but he was like… fancy about it.
His lair was this big network of caves that were half submerged under the swamp, and the entrance was hidden by like throng vines and liechens that had bright red flowers all over them, hence the moniker “of roses.” He had red flowers all over the place because he liked fancy things.
He had levels of Bard and would polymorph himself into an elf or human A LOT and had a whole band of goblins and lizard folk he’d like force to play like cabaret music for him all the time and they were like… basically his slaves because if they fucked up he’d like kill them and they were terrified of him.
Here is a simple rendition of a common scene inside Chateu Oblivion of Roses
i love in fantasy when its like “king galamir the mighty golden eagle and his most trusted advisor who would never betray him, gruelworm bloodeye the treacherous”
When my sister and I were kids we had this one action figure, who was actually a brutalized batman doll without his cape (the dog chewed half his head, too), who we dubbed ‘Evil Chancellor Traytor’. The idea was that in the fictional society of our toys, ‘chancellor’ just came with the word ‘evil’ in front of it, as a matter of ancient tradition. Like ‘grand’ or ‘high’ or something along those lines.
Anyway, the running gag was that the king (an old Power Rangers knock-off doll) had absolute and unwavering faith in Evil Chancellor Traytor, who basically comported himself like a mix between Grima Wormtongue and Jafar from the Aladdin movies. Everyone was always sure that Evil Chancellor Traytor had something to do with the nefarious scheme of the day. The dude even carried around a poisoned knife called ‘the kingslayer’.
The additional twist on the joke, though, was that he never was behind anything. The king was actually right. Evil Chancellor Traytor was the most devoted civil servant in the entire Action Figure Dystopia. He spent his nights working on writing up new legislature to ensure that broken toys had access to mobility devices, was always on the lookout to acquire new shoeboxes for expanding city infrastructure, and drafted a proposal that once got half the ‘settlement’ in my sister and I’s closet moved to the upper shelf so that vulnerable toys were less likely to be snatched up by the dog.
The knife, as it turned out, was as symbolic as the ‘evil’ in his name. See, Action Figure Dystopia had a long history of corrupted monarchs getting too big for their thrones and exploiting the underclasses. The job of the Evil Chancellor was to always remain vigilant, and loyally serve a good ruler – or, if the regent should became a despot, to slay them on behalf of the people.
But since killing the king would be a terrible crime, the Evil Chancellor had to be the kind of person who would willingly die to spare the people from the plight of a wicked leader; because the murder would be pinned on them, in order to keep the ‘machinery of politics’ working as smoothly as ever.
Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor had a diary, in which my sister I would take turns writing out the most over-the-top good shit he’d done behind the scenes. Usually after everyone else had finished talking shit about him. I don’t know why but we got the biggest kick out of being like:
Barbie With the Unfortunate Haircut: Oh that Evil Chancellor Traytor! Why can’t the king see how wicked he is?!
Charmander From the Vending Machine: Char!
Jurassic Park Toy of Jeff Goldblum With Disturbingly Realistic Face: At least if someone puts a knife in the king’s back, we’ll know where to look!
Evil Chancellor Traytor’s Diary: Today I was feeding ducks at the park when I noticed another legless action figure sitting by the benches. I put a hundred dollars into his bag while he wasn’t looking. I really need to increase budgeting to the medical treatment centers. If only we had enough glue, I think we would see far fewer toys trying to get by without limbs… *insert iconic evil laugh*
Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor eventually fell victim to one of my mom’s cleaning sprees, and she decided he was too busted up to keep and tossed him out. My littler brother, who tended to follow my sister and I’s games like he was watching a daily soap opera, cried so hard that we had to do a special ‘episode’ where one of the toys found the Evil Chancellor’s diary, and so he got a big huge memorial and the king threw himself into the empty grave and then ordered the toys driving the toy bulldozer to bury him so that ‘Traytor’s grave would have a body’ (this seemed very important for some reason).
And then we had the Quest For a New King. Somehow or another that ended up being a giant rubber snake called ‘Tyrant King Cobra’.
::closes tab, shuts off computer, and proceeds to have the best day ever just by knowing this exists::
i will always reblog Evil Chancellor Traytor
tbh that’s some A-grade worldbuilding and use of tropes, these kids should be hired to direct movies instead of crusty idiots like Michael Bay
i was looking through medieval drawings of demons the other day and i found the demons that make you gay
Look at these friendly and kind boys! The mlm demon with his overly fashionable haircut and the wlw demon with such big ears to listen & be supportive. They’re both so glad you’re happy together.
the original shippers
they look like a pair of disney villain minions and i love them
And so the world ends, not with a bang but with slightly differing timekeeping standards and unclearly documented functionality.
Glitching technology: Hitting the button would be a reasonable choice now.
Seattle rationalists, utterly failing to internalize the lesson of Petrov Day: Well, okay!
not to call out my people but yeah
Wish I knew the context for this.
Seconding the request for context because this is kind of existentially terrifying to read without context and while that works with your name, @existentialterror, please explain just what the fuck???
Sadly, the first part is out of context, so we’ll never know that.
Petrov Day is a celebration of one man’s decision to trust his own logic over a glitchy system for detecting nuclear missile launches. Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces disregarded standing orders and did not report the alerts for what appeared to be up to six singular missile launches, thus preventing a likely retaliation leading up to a full nuclear exchange. Hitting the button in that case would have been a pretty bad idea.
Hope I wasn’t just explaining things you already knew, but this incident is not common knowledge.
Sorry I should’ve said – was specifically wondering what the fuck happened wrt seattle rationalists
Hah! So to celebrate Petrov Day, my boyfriends made a website for coordinating a simulated nuclear crisis between two different Petrov Day parties. To make this work, each party has a computer open to the screen, which has a “detector system” and a bright red Launch Button, from which you could launch a nuclear attack on the other Petrov Day party. The system is also, true to real life, very buggy, and would often report incoming missiles that didn’t actually exist.
Each party also had a delicious cake. If you got nuked, you had to burn your cake without eating it. If you made it to a certain time (~3 hours out) and nobody’s system was reporting missiles in the air, you “won” the Cold War and everybody got to eat their cake.
So Seattle and Oxford were playing “against” each other. Via a facebook messenger “red phone”, everyone handled the fake launches and coordinating with each other really well. That is, until the last minute, when Seattle’s interface said it was a couple seconds after the Cold War window closed, and somebody hit the Launch Button as a joke. Unfortunately, the server wasn’t syncing the timers up exactly, and it ended up being ~5 seconds before Oxford’s clock registered the window closing, so Seattle mistakenly ended up nuking Oxford, and making them burn their cake.
“If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake. ” – Eliezer Yudkowsky
“Evil of evils” who was the ruler of all the evils
and who was always seeking evils about, evil-joking,
evil-walking, evil-playing, evil-laughing, evil-talking,
evil-dressing, evil-moving, worshipping evils in the
church of evils and living in the evil-house with his evil
family, everything he does is evil, attended the service
too, but he was late before he arrived and when he shook
hands with me on that day, I was shocked as if I touch
a “live electric wire”, but my friend was signalling to
me with his eyes not to shake hands with him to avoid
the shock but I did not understand.
Not related to Evil of Evils but one thing that happens in this book – “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” – is that the protagonist gets imprisoned for days and days inside a hollow tree along with a giant snake and the giant snake scares him all the time which causes him to cry almost constantly and the sound of a child crying is like great music to ghosts so this one ghost starts carrying the tree around like a boom box and dancing with it and he becomes really popular and gets invited to all the hottest ghost parties because of his log with the sobbing child inside
A single mom moves into a new apartment with her young son, only to find out it’s inhabited by a poltergeist. At first she’s spooked, but comes to realize that the poltergeist is helping to raise her son.
I’d watch it.
It’s like ‘The Others’, except that everyone just kind of… gets used to seeing each other. There are two families sharing one house, and okay, one family is a bit dead, but they’re all figuring things out as they go and it’s super handy to have a spare parent or two around.
*
“Mom, I’m home!”
“She’s out shopping, go do your homework.”
“Aunt Ingrid, they didn’t even HAVE homework when you were alive, why are you BUGGING me – “
“When I was alive we churned butter instead of our mother going to the store to buy it, do you want to learn how to churn butter?”
“Fine, okay, homework it is.”
*
“David, don’t walk through the walls.”
“Opening the door is too hard.”
“Then walk through the DOOR like your sister. Respect the conventions at least.”
“Fiiiiiinnne…”
*
“Mom, what are you doing?”
“Fixing the fence.”
“Uncle Roger, are you possessing my mom?”
“We tried just having me tell her how to do it, but it was taking too long and she got frustrated.”
“It’s WEIRD, though.”
“Do you want to do this?”
“No, I – “
“Too late. Come and learn how to fix this. You’re the man of the house now.”
“NOBODY SAYS THAT ANY MORE, UNCLE ROGER.”
*
“Did you have a fight with David?”
“No.”
“Then why are you both making that face?”
“There’s no FACE.”
“That’s what he said.”
“We didn’t have a FIGHT, okay…”
“Aunt Ingrid is worried, she says he’s been moping all morning. He’s barely visible half the time.”
“Look, we didn’t have a fight, I just asked him how he died and then it got weird.”
“STEVE YOU DO NOT ASK PEOPLE HOW THEY DIED THAT IS SO RUDE.”
“Mom, it came up, okay, it wasn’t just out of nowhere!”
“YOU APOLOGIZE RIGHT NOW.”
*
“Steve! David! Isobel! Who broke this vase?”
“Meteor did it.”
“It was not the dog! Which one of you was throwing things in the house?”
“No, really, Mom, it was Meteor.”
“And how did the dog get up on the mantlepiece?”
“Uh…”
“ISOBEL WERE YOU LEVITATING THE DOG AGAIN?”
*
“This is completely inaccurate.”
“Roger…”
“I mean, look at those clothes. I’ve never seen *anyone* dressed like that.”
“They weren’t very careful about accurate costuming in these old movies.”
“I read ALL the Sherlock Holmes stories when they were first published and I ASSURE you he was a GENTLEMAN, not like – “
“Roger, will you just let us watch the moving pictures in peace?”
“But they’re WRONG.”
“We don’t care. Shush.”
*Roger mutters about bossy women and levitates popcorn*
*
“Steve, what happened to your face?”
“I got into a fight.”
“I would surmise from your bruises that you lost.”
“I always lose.”
“Oh, we can’t have that! Come, I will teach you the manly art of fisticuffs.”
“ROGER NO.”
*
“Aunt Ingrid, can you teach me how to make pie?”
“Of course I can… why? I know boys do a lot of things now that girls used to, I understand that, but why pie?”
“I like pie.”
“I can make you a pie if you just want to eat pie.”
This Is a Backup Blog 