a rickety bridge of impossible crossing

Happy hello to all recovering glass-touchers. Hug a jelly and help yourself to the zussenips

Welcome to volume 01 issue 02 of #GarbageDigest, hot off the presses and fresh out of the trash compactor. For each issue that's published, at least one tree is probably planted somewhere

a sign I saw

Shop without credit! Get approved for up to $4000!

$4000 of what? 🤔

do you need some aloe vera for that burn

We here at the antimemetics division of #GarbageDigest (a subsidiary of A Rickety Bridge of Impossible Crossing ZZP) would like to formally state our opposition to the contemporary memetic insult "go touch grass"

First off, grass ain't all it's cracked up to be. You gotta mow it. The gas-powered mowers are dirty, loud, and obnoxious. All the grass dust in the air aggravates allergies and asthma. It's not useful for much. Proper lawn maintenance is an extremely inefficient use of water

Second, it's not even that clever? It's somewhat telling that "grass" is the go-to synecdoche for "nature" in terminally online circles, when it's really the lowest possible bar for getting away from it all. You could stand barefoot in the grass outside your apartment and continue yelling at people without even disconnecting from your wi-fi

Here are some alternatives we find both more interesting to say and more conducive to our holistic betterment:

This list is hereby dedicated to the public domain (our lawyers said any copyright we claim would be dubious at best) so feel free to substitute any of these the next time you feel the urge to reach for a thought-terminating cliché. Don't just pick one and stick with it, mix it up! Using varied language helps maintain neuroplasticity, and your brain will thank you for it later

Finally, if you're ever in a real-world situation where a person is behaving in a manner more befitting a musky birdsite, we recommend telling them to go touch glass

a correction

As the editor-in-chief of #GarbageDigest, I'd like to issue the following correction: I've been writing with the editorial "we" when I am, in fact, a single person. I apologize for the mistake, and will use the first-person singular pronoun going forward, or offer a disclaimer of poetic license where applicable

reality distortion waves

As I alluded to, Elon Musk has successfully spent thousands of times more money than any single human should ever be allowed to possess in order to acquire Twitter. It's the terminal glass toucher's equivalent of buying an island nation the size of San Lorenzo made entirely out of radioactive cocaine. The island's inhabitants don't see much hope that this Musk guy will improve things, so the fediverse has seen an even bigger wave of migrants than during the 10% gambit, and it's been awesome

This is kind of a deep cut, but it reminds me of the end of Unicorn Jelly where the people of future Gryrnu welcome the refugees who were living in the infinitely cascading debris of all the other pulverized world plates, and/or welcome the sapient tube people arriving in a bubble from another universe

I guess the twitter people are more like the stormdivers than the Burangidaeni, but I don't really have a strong sense of how that storyline wraps up, and we definitely have the floating buttplates, so I'm ok mixing metaphors a bit. Luckily, no one reading this will have the slightest clue what I'm talking about, so I'm not too concerned with accurately representing the story beats of Unicorn Jelly

Anyway, suuミi paiΦaa! Happy hello to all new fedizens. You don't have to stay here, but you can't go home. Find your people, find yourself an instance to live in

unicorn jelly apologia

I should probably clarify that Unicorn Jelly isn't quote-unquote "good" by most objective criteria, and I definitely can't endorse anything else the author has done, but I'm glad I read it in my late teens. I still think it's extremely interesting, and it had a positive effect on my developing weirdness

Bryn Canmom sums up how I feel very well in the intro to her liveread:

[A] flawed but intensely fascinating universe-spanning transhuman epic, with one of the most inventive settings I've ever encountered. Despite my criticisms, I came to love it unabashedly, as much for its quirks as despite them

The liveread in question is an excellent companion piece to the comic. If what you've read has piqued your interest, I recommend reading them in tandem. It's a thoughtful critique with neither cheap shots nor pulled punches

I'm sad that Jennifer Reitz never had a chance to come into her own as a creatrix. Wherever she is and whatever she's doing now, I hope she's found some happiness 🦝

  1. Possibly too aggressive, see the Farlex Dictionary of Idioms for more information↩

  2. Vegan/vegetarian/coffee-drinker alternative: "go roast a beany"↩

#GarbageDigest