What if stabbing yourself in the dick is what it takes to get the bowel movement machine running again? After all, everyone knows we’re running out of bowel movements and they’re not something all human beings make all the time

Unless we're to believe Santa operates some constellation of orbital mirrors that redirect sunlight to illuminate his workshop in the dark months, the logistics of this seems implausible but he is magic so I guess maybe?

You're their parent now, sorry it had to happen like this I know it's a lot of responsibility

It always cracks me up when a JRPG tries to soft-introduce a character who will later join the party and it's like you cannot trick me no minor NPC in this game has that much visual detail

Colorful sauropods, perfect timing the week of the Diplodocus pigment cells paper!

(To be fair I spent a lot more time on the color-plates section in the middle than on the actual text but still)

My uncle went back to school to get a graduate degree in oceanography around when I was a deeply nerdy marine life kid and one of my most-read childhood books was a hand-me-down incredibly dry academic text on the intertidal life of Pacific Northwest coastal waterways

Iirc it ended with the viewpoint character seeing what he thought was a robot behaving strangely and thinking "huh they must be breaking down" and then of course it switched to their viewpoint looking at him thinking the same bc I was young and still thought everything needed a Twilight Zone Twist™

(Though in mine the simulacra were robots and not just on a screen, and then humanity died off from a plague and it was about a sole survivor moving around a world populated with dead-eyed simulacra rotely performing programmed mannerisms of no-longer-mourned loved ones)

Every time I see this I remember the short story I tried to write in my 20s about basically this and everyone I showed it to said it was too implausible that anyone would want that

My bugbear is I think the nepo baby discourse drowns out the useful parallel one about class & money privilege. You can’t ever design out advantages for celebrities kids. We can help those from non gilded backgrounds in the arts though

It feels like one of those bits of tech some new company has tried to convince us we want every five years or so since digital photography has been a thing and don't feel like I've ever seen one in an actual person's home..

(And suspect the heat doesn't help on the flooding side here since it's falling in liquid form and immediately running off down the rivers at higher altitudes than it would at more seasonal temps)

At least they're all separate hazards and not ones that make each other worse righ—oh wait, high winds with the ground already so saturated the trees can barely stand on their own roots, oh goody

This is just life now

Chewbacca ate my balls

*That I read somewhere once and do not have a citation handy for so take that as you may