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Cake day: January 26th, 2024

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  • I’ve been chewing on the idea that Sauron is part of the fellowship lately and this seems like the opening I need to tackle the framing.

    I think there’s one perspective in which The Eye is an unrelentingly repressive aspect of authoritarianism and The Ring is both part of Sauron and a catalyst for the unnameable evil inherent within her.

    Alternatively The Eye’s power is identifying the thing that corrupts, and The Hobbit’s power is carrying it. Singling anything out is an isolating task for Mean Girls, and in her work separating the Ring from everything else in the universe Sauron grows the thorniest, vilest crows she can to shield her loneliness. Still, when the Hobbits are at their lowest she reveals herself to hold their hands.

    It seems that one approach to devils is pointing them out for somebody else to hurl into the fire and another is relegating them to the negative space by directing identity towards the Main Picture.

    I thought it was obvious but now I’m not sure. Who did Stuart’s nephew kill?





  • NicolaHaskell@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldAh sweet!
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    1 month ago

    There’s bacteria that grow in the roots of legumes that are capable of capturing gaseous nitrogen. That nitrogen makes its way to the soil, where the trees can suck it up to produce protein, like sunflower seeds. I eat those and by the time I urinate and die the nitrogen has been so concentrated within me that I burn a small hole in the ground for the fungus, sun, and time to decay and heal.

    If I could photosynthesize the carbs needed to bootstrap this operation I would. If I could plant a piece of myself and feed it rainwater and atmospheric nitrogen to grow a steak I would. If I could leave behind shelter I wood.



  • They called themselves the Kool Kids but we knew them as the Terror Twins, the Masonic Menace. They’d force their way into any bit of joy or loss, a trail of rubble and scars bolstering their smothering presence, the moon’s the only force strong enough to pull them away.

    At least that’s what some say happened the night Kool-Aid Man landed on the rocks. Everybody has their say on how he got there, but the facts of the matter are he did get there, the tides were shifting when he did, the moon was full and the sky was clear, and a group of yutes had just started a fire for a clam bake near where shards of glass were later found. All the king’s horses and men gathered to put him together again, but with one piece lost in the sand he bled out entirely.

    The coroner informed Warm-Hinder, who froze in place. A sudden strong gust cracked his icy joints in half, sending his upper parts rolling down 95. When he finally thawed out somewhere near Maryland he dragged himself to the woods, to the remotest cabin of the least connected mountain in all of Appalachia.

    Out front sat Marge and Paddy, who offered a refill to the dehydrated tumbler and pointed to the trail of sweet tears leading to the stranger on their porch. He drank deep then reached for a horseshoe on the ground near his foot, hurling it at the hosts’ hearts. A cloud shifted as he did, and a ray of light caught the glass in the old couple’s hands. A rainbow fired from between them blinding the guest, who fell to the floor grasping at his eyes.

    “I can’t see, I can’t see!” he cried scrambling on all fours, kicking up dust and throwing what rocks his fingers could find.

    “What is it you can’t face?” asked Marge.

    “I thought if I tried hard enough,” he trailed.

    Paddy chuckled through the break in the noise and shared a slice of moldy bread.

    The two sat sipping in silence where they had been and where they’ll stay rocking. The one watched as the rain fell and the sea filled with boiling fire, and the earth pulled in closer still. He heard rhythm in his frantic breathing and saw seedlings sprouting out of softened soil. The beating of his heart filled his feet and he began to dance.

    Night had fallen by then but the forest was bright and the path was clear. So he danced with the gravity pulling him through forest and flood and ocean until daybreak. And when he arrived home he saw the gates and gears of the city lifting and turning, and a river of Red 40 flowing through.


  • At a certain level all data is a pair (some name, blob of bytes). You can concatenate sequences of those pairs into a tar archive and call that a database. To access “the last object” you’d have to seek over the “first” objects. So you can build another set of (some name, blob of bytes) that serves as an index into the first set. You’ll first have to do at least one full pass over that first set, and you’ll need to make space on the books to account for twice as many sets, AND you’ll still have to do some seeking over the “first objects” in the indexing collection, but it all keeps recall times very short!




  • Seeing all these memes Sovcitdartha, the Brahmin’s son, turns inward for a bit then decides to lean in on the whole thing to prove he’s Not A Fool, that there really is something wrong about this arrangement even if he can’t quite explicate it yet. So he sets out on his journey and what he finds in the community college basement is a single tower running Win98 hosting Tim’s Registration Service. And in all the IT contracts of all the states and territories are waterfalls of documentation detailing how their own Departments of Transportation simply MUST interact with any registry, which boils down to “do what Tim says” with no mention of how to delete an entry, and no clear opinion on the matter formed in the coke fueled fire that forged the whole thing. So his odyssey leads him to the Ancient Admins who’d agree to such an augury, to a cottage in the woods. The grey beards knotted at the center of the room form the spokes of a wheel turning in time to a flute and fiddle that make record scratching noises as he enters. He explains what he’s seen and decries how incomplete it all still seems that the axioms of the world are set by consent and not by structure. The trees look on doe eyed with tight lipped understanding as they petrify. He turns to look away and through the window sees the river drained dry, frozen into three clouds running Amazon Car Registry. He closes his eyes and through the (why (why why)) echoing about hears the din of the village Bell-ders chanting to roll for initiative.