Nothing more cringe-worthy than a story where the writer clearly thinks they’re making some broad statement about the human condition in the modern day but actually it’s just been too long since they left their specifically dysfunctional community, which is ultimately irrelevant to most of society. And 95% of the time that community is Hollywood.
[writer who got his big break and moved to LA about 10 years ago] wow has anyone noticed how everyone has become an inauthentic, self-obsessed social climber in the past decade?
JD Vance getting booed everywhere he goes so he has to ask the secret service to evacuate the entire city block so he can go to a restaurant is one of the few good subplots we have right now
if you see a right-wing figure in public, ruin their day in whatever way you can. If you’re not willing to go to prison, you can still at least make a scene and make them worried about being confronted every single time they go outside.
When possible; You have no tables for that evening. Or any evening during their stay. Yes, I know but we don’t cancel reservations unless there’s been a catastrophic event that might endanger our regular long time customers. Am so sorry that we are closed that night for a wedding reception that was booked 6 months ago. I’m so sorry, but that stylist/colourist/nail technician is not available for the next few weeks. Absolutely booked up. Isn’t it terrible how everything is booked up and under renovations and closed for the owners anniversary? Just as awful as some of the staff having been exposed to mumps and measles and got horribly sick at the church potluck. Did they some how slip in anyway? Oh we’re completely out of salmon and the toilet is making a funny noise and the cook broke their wrist and there’s a little problem with wiring for the lights and we can’t get a number of things to work right, and the health department wrote us up about the floors not being clean enough, but you won’t mind at all.
What ever you can come up with, do it. Embody the Horrible Goose you are meant to be.
so I read the article and the story is both less and more insane than it sounds.
basically, there’s been an ants’ nest near a vent shaft of this abandoned Soviet bunker for decades. the nest spilled over into the bunker itself at some point once it was abandoned and there was no way for the ants to make their way back up to the nest, no queen but a constant supply of new colony members raining down from above, and no source of food in the bunker other than the corpses of their fellow ants.
fast forward to some scientists looking for bats that stumble on what’s basically a post-apocalyptic ant society. they go “holy fuck” start studying, and observe that, all things considered, the ants still pretty much act like regular ants doing regular ant things.
fast forward some more, and the scientists feel like they have enough data from observing the colony as-is, so they decide to try an experiment. they put a little walkway between the bunker colony and the og colony in the vent shaft so the bunker colony members have the option of leaving and rejoining the og colony.
spoiler alert: every single ant in the bunker immediately nopes the fuck back to the colony in the vent shaft. within days the bunker is completely empty. the scientists leave the walkway in place so when more ants inevitably fall back down the vent shaft they can just climb back up instead of starting up the cycle anew.
tl;dr it’s not “oh noes evil ants are on a rampage”, it’s “ants forced into a horrible situation to survive get to go home”
