It’s the woman in the thumbnail, isn’t it? She’s been causing it?

Expected this to be Paul Rosalie. I remain hopeful that we’ll continue to witness larger and larger specimens.

The speed of five Olympic-sized swimming pools.

This is for sports performance, not amassing a vast porn collection and then meticulously organizing it by categories, genre, sequence, and creative title.

We need a good man like Davos in charge. A fine and honorable man. A man who could smuggle an onion through naval blockade.

Sorry. That was a stupid word choice on my end.

You’re right. It’s not something I generally use in conversation (not since the early 2010s anyway) and I’m not sure why I thought it was cool to say it on here. Just a shitty reactionary thing that I blurted out.

What an immensely gay fucking thing to plaster on your window.

The stress was a bitch. I work full-time in a grocery store and had a wife and newborn isolated at home every day. Not only was I constantly exposed to the public, but every little symptom or perceived symptom (lot of psychological/false positive over two years) would get the anxiety brewing inside of me, fearing I would eventually bring it home and potentially lose one of them. Every wet cough out of that kid would keep me up at night. This got a little better as the pandemic went on, and I wouldn’t say I was in a constant state of paranoia, but fuck me if it wasn’t a slice of Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride.

You could argue my wife has it worse, though, being isolated at home with a baby for so long with little to do over the long Canadian winters. It definitely wasn’t how she imagined mat leave would be.

HP Lovecraft’s way of conveying old and decrepit settings, threaded with veins of natural beauty that encompass the horrors lurking within them. He had a particular knack for inspiring imagery that is both vividly moving and unsettling. For a specific example, scope out the first few paragraphs of A Color Out of Space

The first couple of paragraphs of The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath serves as a testiment to the sense of majesty he could impart to the reader, but it was also (in my opinion) the last of his older, flowery, and overly-poetic style of writing before he hit a home run and found a new rhythm with A Colour Out of Space and everything thereafter. I personally was not a huge fan of The Dream Quest, but he certainly knew how to describe a triumphant city.

NOTE: I recently watched the new Color Out of Space film immediately after finishing the short story, and in my opinion the short story is infinitely better. It’s more subtle, much creepier, far more detailed, and takes place 150 years earlier (1880s). It has an entirely different vibe that I found to be far more isolating and less obnoxious than the film.

I stopped vaping all together when my daughter was born, as it seemed pointless now to go hide in other rooms just to continue a habit I wasn’t getting much out of anymore. But while I was still vaping, I would typically stand outside with the smokers from work and listen to their dumb raspy asses try to lecture me on the dangers of vaping and how I don’t know what that’s going to go to me long term. They would say this while pulling cigarettes from packaging covered in pictures of cancers and disease (Canada).

Dude keeps a beautiful garden. That’s about the nicest thing I can say about him.

Whoops.

I bought carpet tape to keep rugs in place on my polished hardwood floors.

There’s a random planet in Mass Effect that is tidally locked, and mentions it’s life exists only in the twilight region. The light side is violently hot, and the dark side is brutally cold. Every time I come across this planet my imagination always goes a little wild, picturing strange alien creatures lumbering about in the cool air beneath a deep purple sky and perpetual sunset. It’s such a cool vibe.

Atlas.

I grew up in a house where a lot of weird things happened, and this reminds me of the time my wallet and a few other important articles of mine went missing. My mom had laid them carefully on my bed at the time. She was the only one home. When I got home later, I wasn’t able to find them. She helped me look everywhere, but they were just inexplicably gone. She was convinced I had moved them.

Weeks later, I had lifted my mattress for whatever reason (bed was in the corner against the wall) and they were wayyyy in the back corner, lying between the box spring and the mattress, as carefully arranged as she had laid them out on my bed.

I used to wonder if the extreme panic/anxiety spirals that weed gave me were because I knew subconsciously I was a loser with nothing going for me. Now my life is very secure. I have a job I enjoy and am compensated well enough, I have a wife, a daughter, and I live in a more favorable country than before. So I tried smoking weed again to see, and wouldn’t you know it? I immediately launched into a panic spiral over what a fucking loser I am.

I don’t remember precisely what properties we scored it on, but we had cooked a very messy/crusty/greasy meal of some sort, and afterward we washed the pans with two or three leading dish soaps. I think Joy was the third. Anyway, Palmolive seemed to perform the best overall at cutting through grease and grime in fewer passes. I know there were other aspects to it, but it was just too long ago to recall. I never forgot how impressed I was with Palmolive, though. And it’s green!

We ran trials in my middle school home economics class on various popular dish soap brands, and at the time (23 years ago) Palmolive absolutely blasted the shit out of every other brand, Dawn included. So my wife and kid now ride or die with that brand. It’s green, too…