hoo boy. so, okay, a thing you might know about me is that i keep two giant metalwork ant statues in my front yard. i wanted to get a giant praying mantis statue to go with them but these are oddly enough hard to find and harder to get to one’s house. however, once an idea has occurred to me, i cannot let it go. so any time i’m in my yard now, i think about that giant mantis statue that will one day go there. i think about a giant mantis so fucking often at this point that it was a really small leap from that to being stuck in a terribly boring meeting full of people i didn’t like and you know the whole “imagine them in their underwear” thing? no fuck that. imagine them with a giant mantis in the room. hilarious. love it. it’s giving ray harryhausen. it’s giving stop motion monster flick. it made my day innumerably better every time. and it really was an even shorter leap from that into what i assume all the adults i know who rp warrior cats are doing where i imagine myself as an animal, but giant, and cool, and insectoid. since that moment it’s been totally effortless to do anything annoying or boring that involves other people. i also find mantises have a sort of eerie elegance and stillness to them which i find admirable. good posture, intense gaze, etc. how would a giant praying mantis respond to this email? directly, i’m sure. politely, i hope. without fear of god or man? absolutely. this is what i aspire to. “as per my last email” i type without a shred of human emotion, adding exactly one strategic exclamation point afterward to soften the impact. “though i find the efficacy of the model questionable giving how much data they bootstrapped, i don’t have any reason to believe it isn’t accurate enough to be useful” i say out loud in a meeting as people stare on in horror. i quote decimal places. i snip snap my little jaws. i make direct eye contact with people in other cars on the road. i give a full presentation in perfect stillness while moving my gaze from person to person waiting until they look away before i move on. i am not trapped in room with them. they are trapped in a room, by the veneer of professional courtesy, with me, until i say i’m done. i am not stressed, annoyed, confused, frustrated, bored, or harried. the emotions i’m feeling are: i would like food, and: i will have food, soon, and: it’s going to be delicious. nothing else gets through. this is the mantis mentality.
This really started over a year ago, with a project started in the Renegade Bindery server: people would format different chapters of My Immortal, without knowing what anyone else was doing, and we would put them together into one file. It was agreed upon that everybody would disregard both good design and good taste.
(If you click on each image, the caption lists who designed the page in question. I couldn’t include them all here, but every page is basically a work of art. Horrible, typographically hellish art.)
After raiding a Joann’s of materials I thought belonged in Hot Topic circa 2005 (before it just became Think Geek II: We Don’t Light Our Store,) I almost immediately tested positive for covid. So I made most of this over the last four days, and with varying levels of coherent thought and common sense. The process is documented in a thread here
reviews for weed strains are either like “this got me and the boys so spoinked we couldn’t piss straight” or “afghan war vet here. 32 tours. chronic pain and sixteen mental illnesses. this strain is good, almost makes me stop hearing the bullets. great for when I wake up screaming and crying”
Hey so here is the official US Department of Agriculture guide to obliterating animal carcasses with explosives, complete with diagrams. It has a very strong opening thesis.
What’s easier: dragging an 1100 pound horse carcass out of the woods, or carting in 50 pounds of explosives to obliterate it?
The document also has some very important tips you might not have considered Re: obliterating large animals.
Do you want to totally obliterate a large animal, or is acceptable to simply scatter the remains into more manageable pieces? Either way, you’re in luck! The numbers given above are for “partial obliteration and dispersal,” but if you truly do need to vaporize a horse, the USDA has you covered.
Side note, I’ve read the word “obliteration” so many times it has lost all meaning.
Anyway, I hope you find this information useful. Remember: there’s no use beating a dead horse when you can obliterate it instead!
In 1970 the Oregon Highway Division used 450 kg of dynamite to get rid of a dead whale
