happybadger [he/him]

Working class employee of the Sashatown Central News Agency, the official news service of the DPRS Ministry of State Security. Your premier source for patriotic facts.

  • 20 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2020

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  • Even if I wasn’t a communist, the first things I learn at any job are how I can hook up people who are nice to me and how I can fuck with people who aren’t. It’s in my self-interest to be nice to employees that mostly have that same choice. I will literally do hundreds of dollars worth of free work for a customer if they’re nicer to me than my boss is because doing so fucks over my boss.



  • Some kind of dementia. It’s a cancer of the soul which arbitrarily removes parts of you that you can’t even perceive the loss of. I had an MS patient whose vocal processing was reduced to the point that he could only say variations of “you fucking bitch”. He was totally bed-bound and dependent on a mostly female nursing staff for every single need. Most of those employees were burned out and he could only communicate to them using a wildly misogynistic slur. I’ve seen it reduce a famous AIDS researcher and a WW2 pilot to toddlers, others to cornered raccoons, for some it’s a nightmare they can never wake up from and they just spend all day/night reliving their worst memories. For a good 10% on the ward it just takes away their executive function and they can no longer control their worst impulses or recognise that they should.

    Cancer and strokes are a close second for more or less the same reason, but dementia is so existentially terrifying to me.



  • Another idea is that they weren’t stars at all. The three bright points are within 10 arcseconds of each other. If they were three individual objects, then something must have triggered their brightening. Given the timespan of about 50 minutes, causality and the speed of light would require they were no more than 6 AU apart. This means they would have to be no more than 2 light-years away. They could have been Oort Cloud objects where some event caused them to brighten around the same time. Later observations couldn’t find them because they had since drifted on along their orbits.

    I like this idea. There’s something shark in the water-ish about having three more planet(oids) in the solar system that we only caught a glimpse of for an hour in 1952. It reminds me of Melancholia.