#Bulk waste collections

[hireskipbinadelaide-blog]

Simple Tips to Help In Green Waste Removal

Garbage generation and waste collection, waste management, etc., are everyday activities that we all have a little bit of idea of. However, we often miss the fact that rubbish removal companies categorise the waste into different parts, and one of the most talked about categories is green waste. People have significantly less idea of what this green waste is, and hence, we have come up with this post discussing this relatively new category and what is done as a part of green waste management.

What Defines Green Waste?

The name signifies that green waste is mainly a combination of plants, trees and other flora. But this is not the end of the definition, as several things are added to this category by companies offering rubbish removal services and waste removal services in Adelaide. Green waste can include everything biodegradable, like tree branches, grass padding, flowers, weeds, etc. Apart from this, food scraps and fruits falling in the category of composting waste are also included in this category by rubbish removal companies.

This garbage is dumped in the green bin, and if you see this bin, it means that it has all the green waste dumped.

How To Dispose Green Waste Safely?

Experts from waste removal Adelaide companies recommend five different methods for safe rubbish removal and disposal of green waste.

Green Waste Bin

This is a classic option available for green rubbish removal, and it can store the green waste and be emptied when full. According to waste management companies, this is the most consistent form of green waste removal, but it also has some downsides. This size limit is the first limitation, followed by the fact that they are completely ineffective in bigger projects.

Verge Waste Collection

Some city councils and local authorities run this waste collection campaign annually. It is an excellent opportunity to dispose of green waste successfully. You can use it as a reliable and consistent option for rubbish removal services and waste removal in Adelaide.

Shredding Up the Green Waste

Another awe-inspiring idea is shedding the green waste to make space between branches, leaves, etc. However, this method is used with green bins, as they are very reliable for waste clearing and collection.

Incineration

Another advantageous but not-so-recommended method is burning green waste or green waste incineration. It is recommended to check with the local authorities before using this method. For those who prefer a clear conscience, the best idea is to continue shredding green waste and using green bins for waste collection.

Lastly, skip bins are always available for waste removal and green waste collection in Adelaide. Several companies offer economical skip bins of different sizes, and you can rent them as an ideal waste disposal method.

[soloau21]

Bulk Waste Collection

Solo Resource Recovery offers efficient bulk waste collection services suitable for heavy-duty disposal needs in business settings, utilizing large-scale bins that comply with environmental regulations to ensure safe and responsible waste management​ (Solo)​.

[tallinsales]

[ariadnelives]

Dokkaebi Fire - A Short Story

Author's Note: The bulk of this story takes place during the events of "Force Majeure," directly between chapters 8 and 9, during the crew's time in hiding in Xiagu. It is not intended to be read in sequence. If you'd like to catch up on the series so far, you can do so on ao3 or tumblr.

“Cookie?” Pilar called into the flat as she entered, not waiting to be let in. “It's me today. Ariadne's making final preparations for her surgery tomorrow, but she'll be by as soon as she's back on her feet.”

Aoibheann sat on the armchair in the living room, pointed at the television which appeared to be carrying a local news broadcast from one of Saturn's other moons. She had a blanket draped over her lap, and she watched the news broadcast idly, taking in none of it.

“Remember, starting tomorrow, Ariadne won't remember anything beyond the six-month point in our stay here, and we have to keep it that way, so, be careful what you say around her.” Pilar laughed without joy.

Aoibheann did not.

“You know,” Pilar tacked on, “I'm a complete liar. You could dime out the whole plan and I'm pretty sure me and Ari would absolutely leap for joy as long as it meant you were talking again.”

Aoibheann glanced over at Pilar wistfully, dark circles under her eyes, but said nothing. These little responses indicated their old friend could still hear them in there, that they could get through to her, even if she couldn't muster the strength to respond. She'd barely spoken since they lost the station. She was usually a tightly-wound powder keg, full of fire and passion, and she had to direct it towards her purpose or else she’d explode. Now, it was like all that fire inside her had gone out, and all that was left of her was an exhausted shell of a woman.

She seemed able to move around on her own, but rarely found the motivation to do so. She had grown somewhat thin and gaunt, as she only ate when fed, so every day, Pilar or Ariadne or one of her apprentices would stop by to see her and make sure she ate. Sasha had been spreading herself far too thin on Ariadne's project, but still found time to check in on her and monitor her physical health. Her apprentices had removed all sharp objects, belts, and shoelaces from the premises, but Pilar thought that was overkill. She had known Aoibheann long enough to know she would never physically harm herself. Still, it didn't make it easy to watch her torture herself like this.

Pilar sat next to her, and gently took her hand.

“I hate having to feed you this stuff, Cookie,” she said, opening up a small gray package she'd brought with her. “Replicated MREs. No wonder Baltimore and Beam went to a convenience store twice a week when they were in the army.”

Aoibheann looked with disdain at the lump of meat before her, served with a mush that could only be described as “prepared grain.” She hated eating it as much as Pilar hated serving it to her.

In their small hidden town of Xiagu, all of the food came out of the replicators. Xiagu had a surplus of energy, with its passive solar collection and years of nobody to use the stored power, so nobody was worried about the expenditure of creating food and water from reserves.

Back on the station, they had only managed to earmark power for replicator use two years previously. Like most spacecraft, all of the water fixtures were powered by replicators, generating as much water as needed from a stored bank of energy, which was in turn refilled by a device in the drains which converted waste-water into energy. The food replicator could make prepared meals, but crew members would only be allowed to use it if they could make up the energy cost. This happened pretty naturally, as everybody had to use the bathroom regularly and could credit this to their account, and had the handy benefit of encouraging people to clean up after themselves-- every time you emptied your trash into the energy-reclamation chute, you added replicator energy to your canteen account.

However, back home, most people didn't bother to use the replicators, because truly, Cookie's food was better fresh than anything they could produce, and she loved making it. Here in Xiagu, however, the replicators had nothing but military-grade “Meals Ready to Eat” and raw ingredients programmed into them. When the town was alive, there had been gardens to produce the vegetables, and people to tend them, harvest them, and cook them in the many small restaurants. Now, all that was left was replicators.

Cookie's star apprentice, Yellow, had been put in charge of the replicators while Cookie was indisposed, and had very few requests for anything other than the prepared MREs since they'd been there. Everyone on the crew was required to learn to cook, from Cookie, and nobody particularly felt up to trying to fill her shoes. Everyone had pretty much accepted meals of nondescript lumps of meat, vegetables, and starches on the firm belief that any day now, Cookie would be back on her feet, doing what she loved.

Yellow was the one in charge of food distribution, and had desperately been asking Ariadne to authorize them to reopen Cookie's kitchen, with her at the helm, until Cookie was well enough to resume her post. It's what Cookie would want, she insisted, but Ariadne was taking Cookie's condition unusually poorly, and had refused to allow the kitchen to operate without Cookie present. Yellow was frustrated, but understood. Nobody would feel right about having communal meals like before without Cookie.

Pilar carefully cut up the packaged meal and fed bites to Cookie, who halfheartedly complied with each bite. She offered her a cup of tea, which Cookie held for warmth but wouldn't drink without prompting.

“Look, Aoibheann...” Pilar said, “I know you're not well. I know this has been harder on you than anyone.”

Cookie met her gaze.

“But I don't...” Pilar began, and choked. “I don't think Ariadne will go through with this with you in this condition. She cares about you too much. You know what you mean to her. To me. She's not going to put herself at risk until she knows you're okay.”

Aoibheann looked downcast.

“She needs you,” Pilar whispered. “I need you. Please come back to us.”

****

Aoibheann's mind drifted back to when she’d met Ariadne and Pilar, thirteen years previously. She had been living on the streets for two years and had only passing contact with Pilar. She had been homeless since the Hanguk-Éire massacre, when Susan Weaver’s bombs had incinerated her family’s house and restaurant, left her and her mother destitute, and claimed her father’s life. Her mother had turned to drugs to cope with the loss, and ultimately found herself bleeding out in the gutter after an altercation with a pusher who she couldn’t pay for her latest fix.

She had distrusted the new girl at first. In her experience, another new person living under the overpass was another person who might get to the good scraps before her. She didn’t need any more competition. There was, however, a certain unspoken respect between her and the Aguilar girls. They were the only kids living on the streets of that particular block, and they had to look out for one another. They didn’t talk much, but they had struck up an arrangement. Pilar needed to go foraging to keep Sasha fed, and knowing that she would have to dig through trash bins and steal from loosely-guarded shops to make this happen, she felt it was too dangerous to bring her nine-year-old sister along with her.

So, she struck up an arrangement with Aoibheann: if she kept Sasha safe while she went out on runs, Pilar would try and steal a little extra food so Aoibheann could eat as well. Pilar and Sasha had been squatting in an abandoned house on a nearby side-street, and Aoibheann could crash there in exchange for keeping an eye on Sasha. It was shelter, and food, and it was a better deal than she was getting anywhere else. Under normal circumstances, Aoibheann would’ve developed a mighty crush on Pilar, but crushes were the sorts of things normal girls got to have. Aoibheann needed to focus on staying alive.

The new girl had been Racquel when they met. She had been raving about how the world was going to end, a secret conspiracy to reign atomic hellfire onto the bio-domes. It was the standard fare of the doomsaying lunatic, so nobody paid her much mind, but she’d named Ramos and Ramos specifically in her raving, and that caught Pilar’s attention. Nobody hated the Ramoses like Pilar, although Aoibheann didn’t yet know why.

So, Pilar and Racquel started going out on runs together. Suddenly, they were bringing back more than enough food, not only for the four of them, but they even got to share it with the others under the bridge. One day, they came home clean, wearing fresh clothes, and carrying a bundle of new clothes under their arm. They told her that Racquel’s name was Ariadne now, and that they would be needing her help a lot more often. They’d found some sort of mentor, who would “get them out of here,” but they’d need to spend hours, even days, with her at a time.

Aoibheann wasn’t a fool. She knew that if they succeeded in getting out of here, that she would be left behind. She couldn’t, however, risk being thrown out on the street. She’d watch Sasha and crash on the floor of this abandoned townhouse as long as they’d let her.

Sasha seemed like such a little kid then, although Aoibheann knew on a logical level that she was only three years older.

“If you could be anything in the world when you grow up,” Sasha had asked her one day, while the other girls had been away at their mysterious mentor’s for a few days, “what would you be?”

“I’m just trying to grow up,” Aoibheann said, “if I can make it that far, I’ll see what I can get.”

Sasha scrunched her nose. “You’re not playing the game right.”

“I’m being realistic,” Aoibheann said.

Sasha breezed past this. “I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up.”

Aoibheann considered pointing out that Sasha had a third-grade education and no money, but thought better of it, and instead just sighed. “Well, it’d be a crying shame if you starved to death before then,” she said. “Let’s see what your sister left us.”

Aoibheann looked at the handful of scraps Pilar had left on the table. Pilar had stolen them an entire rotisserie chicken, which Aoibheann had admonished her for-- the abandoned house did not have a working refrigerator, she pointed out, so she’d have to use the meats straightaway or they would quickly spoil and attract flies-- and several cans of diced white potatoes, which Pilar figured would keep Sasha’s stomach full, but Aoibheann pointed out had very little nutritional value. This was, of course, in addition to the six chocolate bars Pilar had, being thirteen years old, been sure to nab on her little excursion.

Aoibheann had nothing in the way of seasonings, except for a variety of salt and pepper packets she’d taken from a loosely-supervised outdoor seating area at a nearby restaurant, as well as, on one extremely lucky day, three sets of cheap silverware and a bottle of hot sauce.

She did, however, have access to a small metal trash can with a lid, water from a neighbor’s hose spigot-- Aoibheann felt bad about this, because water was so tightly regulated on Mars and the owner would surely be steeply charged for the waste, but this was a low priority compared to their survival-- and an old gas stove that the new girl had rigged up to illegally supply them with heat.

Aoibheann had cut the meat off the bones of the rotisserie chicken and plopped the bones into the cold water with all the fat and gristle, and opened up a few of the salt packets into the mixture. She put it on the stove and let it heat up to a boil, then turned down the gas and watched as the mixture turned a translucent yellow. She eventually fished out the bones with her knife, and dumped all the potatoes, and the meat from the chicken, into the broth.

After it had stewed for a while, Aoibheann took a taste. It was thin, watery, and somewhat bland, but it would do for the time being. Using the now-empty potato cans, she scooped out two servings of soup and handed one to Sasha.

“Now, we just have to keep it just hot enough,” Aoibheann said, “and it won’t go bad. We’ll be able to eat this until your sister gets back.”

Sasha took a taste. “It’s…” she had been taught, if she had nothing nice to say, to say nothing at all, so she didn’t finish her sentence. Aoibheann had spent enough time with her to know what she meant.

“It’s a tick bland like this,” Aoibheann shrugged, passing her the hot sauce. “Give it a dash of this, it’ll be a sight better.”

Sasha complied, tasted it, and her face made it clear that while it was in fact a sight better, it still wasn’t quite tasty.

“My mom used to make potatoes with a cheesy sauce,” Sasha said sadly. “They were really spicy. Pilar’s favorite food.”

“My dad was more of a cabbage man,” Aoibheann said. “My mom handled the meats, him the veggies. Hanguk-Éire cuisine is… all about things coming together in the pot.”

Sasha added a little more hot sauce to her soup.

“I wanted to be a cook,” Aoibheann said. “Like my folks, before, all this. My dad was a cook. His dad was a cook. His dad was a cook. And so on and so on, all the way back to our homelands.”

“You could still be a cook,” Sasha said, eyeing her soup. “...someday.”

“Well, we’ll have to get your sister to scrounge us up some quality ingredients, then, won’t we?” Aoibheann said.

The two of them finished their soup, and Aoibheann noted that it was getting late, and insisted that Sasha go to bed. Sasha refused without a story, and Aoibheann tossed back a “tough titties” which was met with an infuriatingly irresistible pout.

“FINE,” Aoibheann groaned, and improvised a story.

“Once upon a time, there was a kingdom,” Aoibheann began. This was how all her stories began, they all took place in this kingdom. “The kingdom, you see, had been through every horror you could put a kingdom through. It had been invaded. It had been burned. It had been taken over and torn in half and put back together again more times than you could count. Every evil overlord you could name had taken the place over, at one time or another. So the people in the kingdom, they were always sad, and they started to wonder, would they ever be free? And then, one day, they found out, there was another kingdom, just like them, halfway round the world, and they decided to join forces. But then, after a few decades of unity and prosperity, the entire world fell into darkness, and the people of the two kingdoms had to run. They ran far away, and found a new promised land in the desert, and built a home there.”

“Then, one day, in the new kingdom, there was a little girl who lived in a little house with her ma’ and her da’, and she loved her life. The dark creature from the old world, it caught up with them. It took her da’, and burned down her house, and she and her mother had to go out into the woods.”

Sasha looked scared. “The woods?”

“Aye,” Aoibheann said, “and her mother dear didn’t last long. There were these flares of Dokkaebi Fire, the goblin lights, and mother dear thought surely she could follow them to safety… Pretty soon, the little girl was all on her own.”

“I don’t like this story,” Sasha said, trying not to betray how frightened she was.

Aoibheann sighed. “Neither do I. But see, the story has a happy ending.”

“Happy?” Sasha asked.

“Happy enough,” Aoibheann replied, “for now. See, the little girl knew not to follow the goblin lights. She ran into the dark, and there she found… a brave, dashing adventurer. A gorgeous girl, noble and good, who’d been lost in the woods herself.”

Sasha’s eyes brightened at this. “Did she have a sword?”

“A little one, aye,” Aoibheann laughed. “And she was on a quest, to find a way out of the woods. But the problem was, she had to look after a sweet, wee little baby, and couldn’t leave it long enough to make any real progress. So the little girl, she’d faced all the darkness in the world. She could handle a wee little baby! She agreed to take care of the baby while the adventurer looked for a way to save herself and the little one.”

“Did she find a way out?”

“Someday she will,” Aoibheann said, “but all she found so far was… a sorceress.”

“This story has everything,” Sasha said.

“The sorceress was as beautiful as the adventurer, and sharp as a tack, but she was untrained. Powerful magic, but she didn’t know how to use it.” Aoibheann explained, “so, together, they managed to track down the Baba Yaga, a wise but crafty old witch, who could teach the sorceress and adventurer how to find the way.”

“And the little girl?” Sasha asked.

Aoibheann thought about this. “The little girl gets to spend time with the sorceress, and the adventurer, and that sweet wee little baby,” she said, “and she appreciates the time she has with them. Someday, they’ll find their way out, and she’ll still be in the woods, but she’ll always be glad to have met them. The end.”

Sasha crinkled her nose. “That’s a bad ending,” Sasha said bluntly. “The little girl should just leave the woods with them. Then find the creature that took her house, and kill it.”

“And how’s she gonna do that?” Aoibheann laughed.

“The adventurer and the sorceress will help her!” Sasha said. “Maybe the Baby Yaga can tell her some spells!”

“Baba Yaga,” Aoibheann corrected. “Okay, so say she does. Say she tells the adventurer and the sorceress everything that happened, and they go slay the evil creature. What happens next?”

Sasha thought about this. “Maybe they fight another creature,” she said. “An octopus?”

“Why are they fighting an octopus?” Aoibheann asked, still chuckling.

“It’s guarding a treasure,” Sasha said as though it were the most obvious thing in the universe. “You have heard a story before, right?”

“Fair enough,” Aoibheann said. “And then, say, they beat all the creatures. What then?”

“Happily ever after,” Sasha said triumphantly.

“Well, you’re a sight more deft at this than I am,” Aoibheann said. “Let’s get you to sleep, I’ll do better next time.”

Aoibheann swaddled Sasha in the dirty, tattered blanket that they’d found a few weeks earlier, sat out in the hallway, and began to cry.

In the present day, Aoibheann thought back to her sobbing in the hallway. At the time, she was convinced that Ariadne and Pilar would surely abandon her when they finished training with Blue. When they started building their first spacecraft in an alley under the bridge, she’d defended it from thieves and scrappers at knifepoint, even thinking that they would use it to leave her behind. When, against all odds, Ariadne had built a spaceworthy craft, she was stunned into silence when they invited her along.

“Don’t be dumb,” Pilar had said, extending a hand to her “of course we’re taking you with us. We started this crew to keep Sasha fed. How are we gonna do that without a cook?”

And so, Cookie had been born. As the goblin lights lit the way to ruin, Pilar’s hand pulled her onto the right path.

****

Now, Pilar’s hand was busy cutting up bites of nondescript meat and placing them into Aoibheann’s mouth.

“Do you remember… back in our street urchin days,” Pilar asked, “Me and Ariadne would come home from Blue’s, put Sasha to bed, and then you, me, and her would stay up late gossiping. We’d show you all the cool stuff Blue had taught us in our lessons, and you’d take the ingredients we’d stolen for you-- better ones, after you started giving me lists-- and you’d teach us how to cook like you.”

Aoibheann almost smiled, and Pilar saw it.

“Alright, you’re right,” Pilar said, cutting her another bite and placing it in her mouth. “Nobody can cook like you. Don’t let it go to your head. But you taught us to cook better than most people.”

Aoibheann accepted another bite wordlessly.

“You know, Ariadne used to use Blue’s tricks to fix up that abandoned house, Alan’s house, and I used to show you all the martial arts tricks, and you’d be rapt with attention,” Pilar said. “When me and Ari started dating, we had a friendly debate about it. See, I thought you had a crush on her, and she thought you had a crush on me. Joke’s on us, turns out you were more than capable of having both.”

Aoibheann came close to smiling again.

“Funny, that’s a fond memory now. Back then, it was the worst year of our life,” Pilar said. “Wonder what we’ll remember fondly from now, when we’re older.”

Aoibheann’s fractional smile faded away. She couldn’t imagine anything worth cherishing from this time. But then, she couldn’t back then, either.

“And we don’t have to talk about…” Pilar cut herself off. “I mean, the… what we’ve had together… The unspoken closeness between the three of us. Rare as it might be that we’ve acted on it, it’s still special to me. To us.The problem has never been that we don’t feel about you, the way you feel about us. If you wanted... what’s between the three of us... to be more, it’d be yours in a heartbeat.”

Aoibheann looked down at her lap.

“We’ve always loved you, Cookie,” she explained. “And don’t get twisted up on the definitions. Every sense of the word. Whatever you’re thinking I surely can’t mean… I mean it. I don’t know what’s going on in your head. I just hate to think that… I mean… we’re going into the most dangerous time we’ve ever faced. If something happens, to me or to Ari… I just want to know you know what you mean to us. To me.”

Pilar gave her another bite, and Aoibheann didn’t fight her on it.

“Do you remember our wedding?” Pilar asked, and laughed. “Of course you do. Hard to forget something like that. Do you remember how angry you were that we wouldn’t let you cook us a grand feast?”

There was a spark in her eyes that demonstrated that she had not, in fact, entirely let this go.

“We stole the supplies for hamburgers from a local grocery store, and made Beam cook them,” Pilar said. “We actually almost got caught, pulled over for speeding on the way home. Ariadne told the cop her name was Ariadne Baltimore. Small town, local cops, everybody knew their parents, they figured they’d just miscounted the sisters, and let her go. Idiots.”

Pilar sighed.

“You weren’t allowed to cook because Ariadne needed you by her side,” she explained. “You were her maid of honor for a reason, Cookie. Our crew, our marriage, our family… where would we be without you? Would we even be us?”

Pilar offered Aoibheann another bite, and she didn’t take it. Pilar looked concerned. She hadn’t eaten nearly enough to be satisfied yet.

“What is it?” Pilar asked.

Aoibheann opened her mouth, thought hard, her eyes darting back and forth as though she was trying to make sense of something she couldn’t put words to.

“Aoibheann, are you… are you alright?” Pilar asked. “Should I get Sasha?”

Aoibheann shook her head vigorously. She had been lost in her depression for months, wondering if she was really better off waking up in the morning, but suddenly, the floodgates had come open, and she couldn’t wait one more second to let out what had been eating at her and destroying her soul ever since they’d lost the station.

Her voice was dry and raspy. She had not spoken more than two consecutive words in weeks, and her body vehemently protested the sudden change in this policy.

“Was it my fault?” She asked, thinking back to a conversation she'd had with their tormentor years ago. “Did I do this to us?”

****

“Excellent work today, everyone,” Cookie’s voice boomed through the kitchen. “The festivities went off without a hitch. This is an anniversary our captain won’t soon forget.”

“Thank you, Chef,” her crew echoed back.

“Dismissed,” she said to the assembled kitchen staff, and then quietly approached one of the greener pirates who’d recently started the galley rotation that was mandatory for the whole crew. “Libby, a word?”

Cookie ushered Libby into a small room at the back, which she used for prep when she was working on more intimate, personal projects. This was the room where she prepared birthday meals for Spacebreather, Ariadne, and Sasha. This was the table on which she’d painstakingly crafted Ariadne and Pilar’s wedding cake. The small walk-in freezer was the one where she’d had a brief, clumsy tryst with Blue on a rare visit to the station, after Cookie had enraged her by challenging her to a contest to see who could make a better mole negro oaxaqueño sauce, and then winning it.

Libby had been invited into the inner sanctum, and the look on Cookie’s face made it absolutely clear that it was not an honor.She was in deep trouble. Worse still, there was a salt shaker on the table in front of her.

“Do you think this is funny, lass?” Cookie asked. “Is this a fun game to you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Chef,” Libby said, actually looking somewhat convincing.

“The cap of the salt shaker was unscrewed. One shake, and dinner would’ve been ruined.” Cookie said. “It was your responsibility to set the table in the captain’s quarters.”

Libby got immediately defensive. “Anybody could’ve done that,” she said, “I didn’t do it, it’s totally unfair that you--”

“Anybody could’ve,” Cookie said. “But I gave you a responsibility. You were responsible for the Captain’s table. You signed off on a table with an unscrewed salt shaker on it. That makes you responsible for the salt shaker, whether you placed it there or not.”

“How is that fair?” Libby replied indignantly.

“Lass, why do you think Ariadne requires all crew to complete a rotation in my kitchen before they’re cleared for field service?” Cookie asked.

“She needs someone to cook for her?” Libby asked derisively.

Cookie sneered. She did not care for Libby, and never had. The girl seemed to attract drama. How, she wondered, could someone with so few friends be so perpetually in the middle of a falling out with a group of them? “And why do you think my standards are so meticulous?” Cookie asked.

Libby declined to answer, because she knew her honest answer would get her in trouble, but her face betrayed what she wanted to say: “Because you’re a huge bitch?”

Cookie answered her own rhetorical questions. “The skills you need to be successful in here, will be invaluable to you out there. You didn’t go over your loadout with a fine-toothed comb. You didn’t take the responsibilities you were trusted with seriously. You allowed your crewmates to operate with faulty equipment, that, had I not intervened, would’ve caused the mission objective to fail.”

“To be clear,” Libby said, “the ‘mission’ was serving them dinner.”

“IN HERE IT’S DINNER,” Cookie bellowed, her eyes full of all the rage and fire that she kept tamped down in her heart every second of every day, and slammed her fists on the table, knocking down the salt shaker. The chrome lid clattered off, and salt spilled onto the teak countertop. Cookie wordlessly grabbed a pinch of it and tossed it over her left shoulder. “In here, you fail in your duties and it means dinner isn’t very good that night. Out there, you fail in your duties and your sisters in arms die. That’s why Ariadne makes you work with me before you’re allowed to work for her. You can’t be trusted to handle the stakes out there if your team, and your commanding officer, can’t even trust you to do your job correctly when the stakes are only whether tonight’s chicken will be a little dry. Is that crystal clear?”

Libby looked as though she was about to protest, or accuse Cookie of being melodramatic, but Cookie cut her off. “Think very carefully about what you say next,” she said, “and if you’re lost as to what answer I’m looking for...” She pointed at the band that she kept tied around her head, so that even if one of her brilliant red hairs slipped out of its tight bun, it would still not fall into her face. It was white, and said, in bold black text, “YES CHEF.”

Libby grumbled. “Yes, chef,” she said. “next time, I’ll check the table settings more carefully.”

“Glad to hear it,” Cookie said. “But I think it’s important that you know… I know you put the shaker on the table.”

“What?!” Libby snapped.

“If the Captain, or her first mate, were to be poisoned, I would need to be able to verify who’d done the deed.” Cookie said. “Every step of my meal preparation is accounted for. There is a record of every action taken in this kitchen, cupboard-to-table. If something goes wrong with a meal, within seconds I will be able to identify the point of failure and exactly who was responsible for preventing it. Of course, it helps to have a private video feed into the captain’s quarters.”

Cookie tossed her communications device onto the table, and hit play. It projected a small, but surprisingly clear, hologram of Libby setting the table, smirking as though struck with an idea, and unscrewing the cap of the salt shaker.

“You have… a security camera… in their quarters?!” Libby asked.

“I’m the only person in the system they trust with it,” Cookie said. “I trust them with my life, and they trust me with theirs. Now, I gave you a chance to confess to your little prank, and you decided to lie, to pass the buck onto someone else. I’m afraid I can’t let that slide. I’ll have to fail you for this rotation. Come back at the start of the next one and you can reapply.”

“What?!” Libby snapped again. “I’m two days away from finishing! I have to start my galley rotation over again just because you caught me playing a harmless prank on your little pervy peep-show?”

“Call it pervy if you like,” Cookie said dismissively. “The nature of my relationship with the captain and her first mate is enthusiastically sanctioned and is, frankly, none of your concern. The behavior you showed in here, would’ve only spoiled Captain Ariadne’s dinner. If you showed the same level of carelessness and irreverence out there, it might’ve gotten someone killed. ‘Harmless’ indeed. You’re not responsible enough for field work until you can prove you can handle kitchen duty.”

“This is bullshit,” Libby said, gathering up her things to storm out of the room. “Like it even matters whether that bitch’s little dinner is ruined.”

Cookie slammed her fists on the counter again.

“Captain Ariadne is the greatest woman who ever lived,” Cookie growled, “and if I hear you speak of her like that in my presence again, you’ll lose a hell of a lot more than your galley rotation.”

Libby moved to storm out, but Cookie rushed the door and held it shut.

“Now, you listen to me, you little twerp,” Cookie said, jabbing a finger into Libby’s chest, shaking with anger. “That woman pulled me out of the gutter-- pulled all of us out of the gutter. There is nothing more important than the work she does, and we are the beating heart that allows her to do it. So if you want to be a part of this crew, you’ll show her some goddamned respect and start taking your work fucking seriously.”

Libby looked furious.

“What do I want to hear?” Cookie asked pointedly.

Pilar was astonished. “You think… because you were hard on the Nameless in her galley rotation… that she went totally off the rails, tried to kill us, and drove us out of our home?”

“Yes, chef,” Libby grumbled after a beat, and Cookie allowed her to pass.

****

“She tried to say we were like a cult,” Cookie said weakly. “That we were just minions blindly following Ariadne’s orders. That we turned against anybody who didn’t fall in line.”

“Is any of that true?” Pilar asked rhetorically. “Does the crew actually act like that?”

Cookie let the tears come. “I do,” she said. “What if she… how do I know she isn’t holding my devotion, my zeal, against the entire crew?”

“You… blindly follow Ariadne’s orders?” Pilar asked, entirely rhetorically. “That’s a surprise, I thought you really believed in our mission.”

Cookie was taken aback. “I do!’

Pilar smiled. “There’s some of that fire,” she said. “I’ve missed it. Aoibheann… when is the last time Ariadne actually gave you an order?”

Cookie had to think about this, but came up short.

“Exactly,” Pilar said. “This is what’s been eating you, all this time?”

Aoibheann looked afraid to reply, so she just asked what she’d wanted to ask, ever since they were driven out of their home.

“Do you forgive me?” She asked. “Does she… does she forgive me?”

Pilar looked Aoibheann square in the eyes. “Cookie, you’ve never needed our forgiveness. An insane terrorist attacked our home. There’s nothing you could’ve done to prevent that.”

This was not what Aoibheann wanted to hear.

Pilar sighed. “Of course we forgive you, Aoibheann,” she said in a voice that sounded entirely earnest, but using words that betrayed how sarcastic she was being: “for not allowing someone who turned out to be a sexual predator and an actual serial killer tamper with our food and ruin our anniversary. We forgive you for being the most devoted friend we’ve ever had. Because someone else mistreated us, it must’ve been wrong that you treated us right. We will always forgive you for loving us, Aoibheann. You will never lose our forgiveness for that.”

Aoibheann was struck speechless again.

“Don’t go quiet on me,” Pilar said affectionately, “I just got you to talk again! I’ve missed your voice.”

“I appreciate your taking care of me,” Cookie admitted, “while I’ve been… not myself.”

Pilar gently put her hand on Aoibheann’s, and gave it a squeeze, and then told her the most reassuring truth she had.

“The Nameless is a user,” she said. “She wants a bunch of people who act like puppets and put her well-being first. Ariadne spends every second of every day encouraging her crew to think and act for themselves, and to put each other’s well-being above all else. That’s why she thinks Ariadne’s a tyrant. Not because you defended her honor after a sociopath tried to ruin her anniversary and then called her a bitch.”

Aoibheann felt as though she’d just received absolution for something that had been dragging her through the muck for months. How could she not believe Pilar, of all people? She began to cry openly.

“Hey, hey,” Pilar said, “it’s okay! I got you.”

“I’ve let the crew down,” she said, “had them eating this flavorless mush for however many months. I’ll be back at a stove first thing in the morning, don’t you worry--”

Pilar laughed. “Aoibheann… Cookie, I’m glad you’re back but… don’t push yourself too hard, okay? Let your apprentices handle it for a bit. Besides, you haven’t walked by yourself in a pretty long time. It’ll take a bit before you’re seaworthy again, let alone fit to run a kitchen.”

Aoibheann looked downcast. “Well, I’ve spent enough time sitting around like a lump being no good to anybody,” she said indignantly.

“You’re plenty good to us,” Pilar said flatly, “just by being here. We love you, Cookie. You don’t need to… justify your existence by being a devoted servant.”

Aoibheann was uncomfortable with this sentiment, and it showed on her face. This was, after all, how she showed her affection for Ariadne and Pilar. How could she show them her love and devotion without being able to cook for them?

“I don’t know how to…” Cookie began. “Please… Please, just… tell me what to do.”

Pilar sighed. She knew Cookie was far too devoted to her duties to go completely without orders. “She and I will be back in a few hours, for dinner. Let her hear your voice. Tell her you love her, and wish her luck on her procedure. If you have the strength, give her a hug. And, most importantly, just… please, be okay. Be kind to yourself and take all the time you need to get back on your feet. We’ve only got the one Cookie, so take care of her for us, okay?”

Cookie smiled, and squeezed Pilar’s hand back with what little strength she could muster.

Pilar picked up the now-empty tray that the MRE had been on. “Now that you’re back, do I have your permission to start up the kitchens? Let your apprentices do some real cooking?”

Cookie nodded her head.

“Then I guess this is truly an event worth of celebration: you’ve had your last Meal-Ready-To-Eat,” Pilar laughed. “I’ll see you tonight, Cookie. I want to put some meat back on your bones, so I’ll be cooking, and I expect you to be looking over my shoulder and barking orders at me the whole time.”

Cookie looked at her and smiled, and Pilar’s heart melted. It had been a long time since anyone had seen that.

****

Cookie’s apprentices stood in a straight line at the back of the Hotpot Spot, an abandoned restaurant that Sweettalk had identified as her childhood favorite. Cookie, wearing the chef’s coat she’d fled the station in, freshly laundered, and her trademark “YES CHEF” headband, limped into the restaurant, supported by a cane that Sweettalk had fished out of her childhood home, and said had belonged to her grandfather.

Cookie was still not back to full strength, but her apprentices could see the fire they’d come to fear and love had returned to her eyes.

“As you may have noticed,” Cookie announced, the natural loudness of her voice undiminished by her time indisposed, “I have been… unwell, of late. As such, I am unable to resume my duties at this time.”

Her staff turned to her chief apprentice, Yellow, for guidance. Yellow remained silent, so the rest of them did as well.

“It’s alright, kids,” she said, stamping the cane on the ground loudly. “You don’t have to pretend. I’m not my old self yet. It’s fine. I wouldn’t feel right resuming my post here anyhow. This isn’t my kitchen. I’ve called you all here because you are the apprentices most equipped to run a kitchen of your own.”

Yellow nodded in assent.

“As such, I have a new directive for each of you, until such time as we’ve retrieved my kitchen, and I’m back to my usual vim and vigor, each of you is to select one of the defunct restaurants in this town, take your pick of the remaining staff and any available volunteers, and you will run your kitchens to the standard I have taught you.”

Cookie sighed.

“I know what you all think,” she said. “I know what you’ve said to me, in the past. You think your best is only a pale imitation of my cooking. But I need you all to know that… isn’t true.”

“Chef?” Yellow asked.

“I was the fourth person on this crew, lass,” Cookie said. “The first person to join, after the founding members. At the beginning, we had one mission: Keep Sasha Fed. There is nothing I value more highly than that mission. I live for it, and if I’m blessed with the chance, I will happily die for it. We may have expanded the definition of ‘Sasha’ to include everyone we love, but this mission is and will always be my life’s labor. Food doesn’t just sustain us. It is love, in physical form. The Captain and the First Mate have been very gracious to me, in the time we’ve known each other, by allowing me to show them my love and devotion in the way I’m able to offer. Over the last nine months, they have shown me the devotion was not one-sided, and given me the love I was able to accept. So your mission is, as it always has been: get in the kitchen, and show your love to the crew. Fill their bowls with it, in the way only you can, with or without me. And when your cup is empty…”

Cookie choked up a bit, and did a halfway decent job masking it.

“...When your cup is empty, allow those who love you to fill it back up, until you’re ready to pour from it again.”

After a long, uncomfortable beat, her crew shouted back “Yes, Chef!”

“I have been derelict in my duties,” Cookie said. “I let you go this many months without loving one another properly, because you wouldn’t do it without me.”

“Chef, permission to speak freely?” One of her younger apprentices, a quiet young boy who specialized in pastries, piped up.

“Granted,” Cookie said.

“You never ordered us not to run the kitchens without you. In fact, before…” He paused carefully, then opted to leave it unsaid, “before, you always taught us how to take the lead for the rest of the crew, when you had to cook for the Captain’s table. We wouldn’t run the kitchens without your say-so because…”

“It’s okay, lad, no need to be scared of the likes of me,” she reassured him.

“We were ordered not to,” he told her. “The Captain was very clear: ‘There’s no crew without Cookie.’”

Cookie leaned on her cane and looked a bit sad.

“She couldn’t handle it, Chef,” Yellow explained. “Knowing somebody else was doing your work, while you were suffering the way you were.”

Now Cookie could feel her heart melt. “She said that, did she?”

The young baker boy winced. “She said that there’s nothing more important than the work you do, and that everything the crew does, is just so you can do it,” he said. “She said… well, she said she was derelict in her duty to you, and that she couldn’t replace you until she’d made it right. Until you’d forgiven her for letting you down.”

Cookie laughed. “We’ve known each other a long time, indeed,” she said. “The captain is a sentimental one, I’m afraid. She blames herself for all this. For my condition. Don’t tell her I said this, but she’s still more Catholic than she’d like to admit.”

Everyone’s eyes flared at this. Of course none of them would tell her she’d said that, as they all valued keeping their heads attached to their necks too much. Cookie was one of the only people in the system who could get away with saying something like that in front of Ariadne.

“She could never let me down if she tried,” Cookie said, “and even if she did, I will always forgive her. That you can repeat to her. Now, that’s enough prattling on from an old fool. You all have restaurants to open. To work!”

“Yes, Chef!” Her apprentices all shouted, and broke formation to claim their restaurants.

“And remember,” she shouted after them. “If you talk to the Captain, this was her idea!”

She had, in fact, passed her forgiveness along to Ariadne the previous day, before her surgery, and assured her that she didn’t need forgiveness, the same way Pilar had done to her. After her procedure, Ariadne wouldn’t remember Cookie giving her consent to reopen the kitchens, but she was delighted that when she came out of it, she seemingly remembered, on some level, that she had been absolved of all wrongdoing.

She was relieved when, during the fight Alicia staged with her, Ariadne had suggested they put her apprentices to work in the kitchens. Despite being set back several months, she was done punishing herself, and letting everyone else punish themselves with her. It was a do-over many were not fortunate enough to get, and after all she’d lost, Aoibheann was not one to turn her nose up at a second chance.

****

Months later, when all this was over and Sasha’s medicine and a lot of good eating had restored her muscles into mostly proper working order-- she still felt uneasy at times, and preferred to keep the cane on hand, just in case-- they were repatriated to their home, the Nameless had been defeated, and the station had erupted into a celebratory frenzy. Yellow and the kitchen staff had burned the candle at both ends to supply enough party snacks to keep anyone from drowning in all the wine. Two former crew members, Baltimore and Beam, had returned to the station to join in the celebrations. Sweettalk and Sasha had, believing themselves slick, pulled Ghostrunner and her new girlfriend Vigil back to their quarters. Alicia had brought Blue back to the station and, in the haze of wine, loudly announced her intention to start a relationship with her, before disappearing back to her own quarters. Cookie and Blue had, despite their past rivalry, a deep, abiding respect for one another, and Blue was one of the few people who was authorized to do as she pleased in the kitchen. Cookie knew firsthand that after Blue’s enthusiastic and athletic lovemaking, she would likely need something to eat, and a bit more wine, so she’d set a bottle of red and a bowl of fresh mozzarella in conspicuous locations in the hopes that she would find them. Cookie was, uncharacteristically, not in the kitchen that night.

If she had learned anything from the past year, it was that she had to sometimes set the weight of the world down, and allow the people she loved to take care of her as much as she took care of them. So, as had become tradition, once per month, she would retire to the Captain’s quarters instead of her own, and allow her friends to show them how much they loved her. Pilar spent the day marinating meats, just the way Cookie had taught her, and Ariadne had built a heating element into her personal dining table so that Pilar could cook them some of Cookie’s favorite foods.

They would then retire to the bedroom for a night of passion-- Ariadne always had some new device she’d built and wanted to show off. Being married to Spacebreather, she was in the unfortunate position of being a bit of a pillow princess, but not on pillow principle, and so never had anyone else to use it on, and Cookie was the only person other than Ariadne who Spacebreather was willing to touch. They would spend this time laughing, and experimenting, and making sure not an inch of her, or the captain, went unkissed, and then they would fall asleep in each other’s arms, all the while gossiping and reminiscing the way they had back on Mars.

Sometimes, on these nights, Cookie would think back to what Spacebreather said to her, during her episode, about how if she ever wanted something more between them, she could have it.

The thing was, she didn’t want something more. She treasured these nights they had together, but as far as she was concerned, nothing had changed about what they were to her. They were her best friends, and they were her calling in life. She would, to the best of her ability, serve their mission with almost religious zeal. Even unto her death, she would prioritize keeping her loved ones happy and healthy. She had already loved them, more, she believed, than she could ever love anyone else, even when they had started an exclusive relationship with one another, and she was just a heartbroken teenager pining after them both. How could she want something more, when she couldn’t even imagine something better than what she already had?

The first time the three of them had ever fallen into bed together, years after Ariadne and Pilar had made it clear they were soulmates, they had been a ball of teenage hormones, propelled by a raunchy party game that had gotten a bit out of hand. Aoibheann had awoken mortified and furious at herself for daring to succumb to her own desires like this. Her whole life, whenever she’d allowed herself to love something, it was taken away, and that only when she accepted that something was beyond her grasp, would she stand a chance of being lucky enough to attain it. She was sure that by admitting to her wants, and acting on them, she had ruined everything. Except, Ariadne and Pilar noticed her embarrassment and simply chose to behave as though nothing had changed. It had happened only occasionally in the past, and each time, Ariadne and Pilar would wait for Cookie to bring it up. Otherwise, it was completely unspoken.

The one crucial difference was, now, Aoibheann “Cookie” Gyeong, once the saddest girl on Mars, had finally accepted that it was okay to want, and to act on those wants, that this was not following the goblin lights to her death as her mother had. She, who loved her life so much that she shut down for the better part of a year when she feared it had changed irreparably, spent most of her time refusing to acknowledge what she loved about it. She did her job, showed her love, and asked for nothing in return except for the ability to keep doing it.

“You know,” Ariadne said, running her fingers through Aoibheann’s long, smooth, bright red hair, as a sleeping Pilar cradled them both in her arms, “we don’t do any of this for you. We do it because we like doing it. It’s fun for us.”

Cookie laughed. “Oh, I hadn’t noticed,” she quipped.

Ariadne smiled, and told her something she’d waited years to be sure Cookie would be ready to hear. “Thank you,” she said, “for being my friend. For loving me. For making what we do worth it.”

Aoibheann shot a smile right back. “I could say the same to you.”

[jjustin1379]

Reserved List

There are over 500 Magic the Gathering cards on the reserved list. This list is a promise to never reprint these cards in paper which means, that for these cards, the copies that exist are the only copies that will ever exist. The reserved list only comprises of sets from before the year 2000 so most reserve list cards are 25 years old minimum. You would think that the cards on the reserve list would all be astronomically high but very few are over a dollar. Many feel that the reserved list will eventually be rescinded but the failure of the 30th anniversary edition cards makes this seem unlikely especially in the modern era. It seems like a lot of money is in newer Magic cards especially with the advent of serialized Magic cards. Now may be the time to move in to bulk Magic the Gathering reserved list cards. Every year the number of reserve list cards in circulation dwindle. Cards get lost or destroyed or they enter vaults never to see circulation ever again due to investors and speculators. At the moment, old school Magic seems to be at an all time low so this might be time to move in to reserve list cards. I recently purchased a couple hundred reserved list cards in various conditions and over the next couple of weeks I will post them online and explain the logic behind my purchase. Am I simply wasting money buying bulk that will never rise above a buck? Am I a fool for diversifying my purchases instead of focusing on one specific reserved list card and attempting to buy it out? Only time will tell. However, I really do have a love and a passion for the cards and it makes me feel a part of the community to have a piece of magic history in my hands. It is an interesting feeling to own something where there are only a certain number of copies on earth. Isn't this the appeal of serial numbered cards? Are serialized cards just a modern day reserved list for a new era? After all, most of the cards on the reserved list are cheap for a reason. They are simply unplayable in the modern magic the gathering era in almost all formats. Most serialized cards are chosen because they see play and are highly sought after cards. Any cards seeing a lot of play on the reserved list are already astronomically expensive so what is the point? Well, no one can see the future and some cards that were completely unplayable just need the right card printed to become all stars. The only question is which cards will reach that echelon. Yes, I have some opinions on which cards are more likely to see possible play in the future but you never know. That is why I want to diversify my assets. Should a reserve list card below one dollar spike card I will likely have many copies of it in my collection. Should all cards on the reserve list eventually spike as people realize that once all copies are gone they are gone and the cards aren't getting any younger then I will have simply made a profit. Even now, I do think there are cards on the reserve list that are criminally undervalued. I also believe that one day a card will spike on the reserve list that no one will predict. I am going to show the reserve list cards I bought this month although I have been buying reserved list cards for years.

[macravishedbymactavish]

Dishes Vs. Laundry Headcanons (TF141 + Alex)

Based off the theory that every couple has someone who prefers doing laundry while the other prefers dishes. NOT an x reader HC list

| Blog HQ | Modern Warfare Masterlist | Modern Warfare 2 Masterlist | Ghosts Version | Taglist Open |

Amazing at fitting all the dishes into the dishwasher.

Soap // Dishes

Not to mention it takes care of all the work for his dishwasher safe items (95% of his kitchen)

The other 5% (all his cutlery - somehow he ended up with all handwash only) is washed and drying in under 10 minutes.

Side note: he runs out of forks the quickest and can't quite figure out why.

Then it's waiting for the dishwasher to be done, the dishes to be dried and quickly putting them away.

Gets so, so sick of the guys making jokes about his codename in regards to this.

The first time was funny, the 10th time gets you a soaked shirt and Scottish swear words.

Doesn't hate laundry necessarily, but definitely not big on folding his clothes.

He just kind of accepts the fact that they're going to get wrinkles.

Accepts the fact that he'll be ironing his clothes for the rest of his life.

"Can't let those lessons from Ma go to waste"

Has, on more than one occasion, started doing his bedding in the morning and forgot about it until he was ready to sleep for the night.

Something about the meticulous process with sorting, folding, and putting away clothes just clicks with him.

Ghost // Laundry

Always sorts whites from colours

Has a seperate hamper by the washer for towels

Folds everything (even the underwear) into small little bundles when he packs for a trip or work.

Soap's entire worldview on laundry stresses him out a bit. Adding steps to a chore you already don't like?

Why

WHY

Not a fan of doing dishes. Somehow finds it more repetitive, time-consuming, and soul crushing.

Has thrown out 2 plates in his life because he couldn't be bothered with washing them

Has also genuinely contemplated Soap as a housemate when doing dishes.

"Solving each other's problems"

Has an expansive plastic cutlery collection.

Not even the type you'd buy in a large bulk pack from the store; but like cutlery, you get from takeout.

Argues that it's amazing for on the go lunches (you toss it out) and uses the forks to stir his coffee in the morning.

I would be lying if I told you this man hasn't thought of buying bulk everything to last him a month just so he doesn't have to clean.

Price // Neither, but does them anyway

Except Ghost pointed out that the bulk underwear would itchy, and Laswell refused to let him use her Costco card for this.

Not that he's messy or gross - no, no.

He is a rather clean guy but absolutely hates the process of getting there. It's mundane. It's exhausting.

Has walked by the washing machine, full of laundry he's waiting to swap over and muttered "fuckin' hell" when he realized it's not done yet.

Glares into the cupboard when he realizes his favorite mug is dirty, promptly glares at the mug for being dirty.

Then internally complains the entire time he's washing the thing. Despite having many other, perfectly suitable mugs in your cupboard. John.

He has the utmost pride in his appearance and is fairly meticulous about the care of his clothes.

Gaz // Laundry

It helps that his dad was the same way in his youth and taught him all the tricks to keeping things bright, getting stains out, and having the nicest smelling laundry.

Happily gives this advice out to his teammates and friends (no, I'm not doing your laundry for you. Wankers)

While doing dishes is sort of the same concept (different care needs for different things), he finds it too much of a pain when cooking.

As Kyle is the "seven knives" meme.

Yeah.

It also doesn't help that he always organizes the cupboards and drawers before all the dishes are done

Then, he has to start re-doing everything when he runs out of room for bowls.

Which typically ends up in the surplus of clean dishes stacked neatly on the counters or table.

Not by concious choice

Alex // Says he doesn't mind either, but it's actually neither

He truly doesn't mind either. he's just too much of a free spirit about it.

I'm talking: "eh, I'm fine to do it on the weekend"

Then, realizes he has one set of clean boxers left on a random Wednesday night.

Or forgets the clean laundry in the washer until it gets a weird smell and needs to be rewashed

Kyle had no other advice other than:

Just don't forget it in there then???

The same goes for the dishes in the dishwasher (minus the weird smell)

80/20 split on dishes, though (clean, sitting in the dishwasher)

80% of the time, he'll grab whatever dishes he needs for meals or cooking from the dishwasher as he goes.

20% of the time, he'll take everything out and put it away.

100% of the time, he promises himself to get the entire process done in one day (then 80% of the time forgets)

Taglist (all content): @bloodonmyhands-1221 @v1naco @bowtruckleninja

Taglist (Alex content): @glitterypirateduck @deadbranch @gcing-back-to-505

[mysteryfleshpit]

Q&A 005

@shnowyfox asked:

Where do you find so many of these artifacts relating to the park's history? And have you ever found artifacts that may have been from before Jim found the pit? (Like things from the native American tribes and whatnot?)

A few years ago, I forget now how many, I came into possession of a small storage building previously owned by a local community college. What I have posted has largely come from this scattered and disorganized collection of items and documents. As far as I have looked I have not found many artifacts from before the “discovery” of the pit by James Jackson.  

@bub14dog-blog asked:

How does the Pit stay hydrated? And does the Pit seem to have a urinary system?

The Superorganism shares an adjacency to both the Edwards and Ogallala Aquifers, which Geobiologists speculate supply most of the water needs of the organism. However, it is worth noting that the Superorganism appears to have a high hydration retention rate with minimal water loss for its size. Much of the internal water volume is located in the chemical composition of the fluid found within the Gastric Seas, or within smaller but nonetheless massive water bladders which seem to provide reserves of fresh water for the biological process of the Superorganism.

Urine, or other identifiable forms of liquid waste, are probable but as-yet undocumented. The unique geobiology of the Mystery Flesh Pit suggests a complex metabolic cycle in which typical waste materials (namely minerals) are broken down and sequestered for use in other parts of the anatomy instead of totally expelled.

@love-abandon asked:

have you recovered any information regarding the state of the mystery flesh pit during the 90's?

Most of what we know about the pit comes from the 1990s, as that decade is widely considered the “golden age” of the park. From 1989 until around 2002, the park experienced yearly visitor throughput comparable to regional tourist destinations like SeaWorld or the Magic Kingdom. While the bulk of infrastructure development and construction took place in the early 1980s, the 1990s saw massive public and private investment in such infrastructure, including the Intrapark Resort and the renovations to both the Lower and Upper Visitor Centers. If there was a time to have gone to the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park to experience it at its best, it would have been the mid 1990s.

@joebob6448 asked:

Have there been any occurrences of ecological interactions between the creatures which live within the superorganism and ones outside of it besides amalgamations? For example, predation, parasitic, or even non-mutagenic symbiotic relations?

It is now well-known that many of the parasitic species within the Permian Basin Superorganism routinely surfaced and hunted small wild and domesticated animals, with some reports dating back to the mid-1800s. Even with the intervention of Texas state Fisheries and Wildlife personnel, as well as interventions from the National Park Service, it continues to be a minor problem in the areas surrounding surface orifices. Prior to the introduction of European cattle and other livestock to Texas, however, it is unknown to what extent this sort of scavenger hunting took place.

@goblinus-maximumbo asked:

How does Corpusite form? Also what's Oscuralite and why is Anodyne mining for it?

Photograph of an operating mining team clearing out fluid buildup.  Oscuralite is the mineralogical name given to “black bone”, so named due to its incredibly dark coloring. This coloring is the result of a dense concentration of microscopic, helically-oriented carbon strands. Oscuralite occurs within the center of certain mineral bone structures within the Superorganism and are theorized by Venteriologists to function as a rigid reinforcement or “primary skeleton” to complement the more conventional (if not enormous) skeletal system which serves as a more pliable, “secondary” skeleton. Oscuralite exhibits a range of incredible material properties, such as structural rigidity higher than steel, a strength-to-weight ratio fifty times higher than titanium, thermal insulation capabilities greater than that of aerospace-grade ceramic composites, all while having a mass of less than 730 grams per cubic meter of material. Corpusite, or “Pearls”, as they are often referred to in the industry, are nacreous mineral formations which nearly always exhibit exceptionally-perfect spherical geometry. Due to the sub-molecular spherical tolerance that Corpusite spheres demonstrate, they have become invaluable as precision components in certain optical and measurement applications. Additionally, the near-complete uniformity of the crystalline structure which comprises the spheres has exhibited a secondary (though arguably more valuable) property of superconductivity at a temperature range of -38°C to over 1100°C. These spheres are commonly found in loose clusters within specialized tissue structures within the Superorganism, and are believed by venteriologists to be formed through a nacreous aggregation of discrete, though structurally-identical layers. The exact venterial function of Corpusite, as well as the organs which produce the material, is hypothesized to serve some role in the coordination of the nervous system of the Superorganism, but this is still poorly understood.

@ansalander asked:

Is there a wedding chapel?

And

@247slayc asked:

reactivated and rebranded this account just to ask has there ever been a wedding at the park before its defunction?

Yes, many marriages were officiated (and subsequently consummated) around and within the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park. For reasons understood neither to myself or the U.S. Dept. of the Interior, the park was a popular nuptial destination. Within the Lower Visitor Center itself was an interfaith chapel which could be rented for wedding ceremonies with a small deposit. Additionally, due to a pre-NPS contractual clause requiring an ordained ecclesiastical minister to be on-site within the LVC during operating hours, officiation of wedding ceremonies was also a limited service offered. The addition of several hospitality facilities in the late 1980s to the park only increased the annual instances of weddings and on-site receptions. The Hilton Intrapark Resort even openly advertised wedding packages.

@jurassicateer asked:

Mystery Flesh Pit National Park Tycoon video game?

Frontier Developments, Colossal Order (or anyone, really!), my DMs are open. If you guys want it to happen, you'll have to let the world know. The same goes for a TV show/Film/miniseries/Chili's promotional tie-in. @bearb0i asked:

So I HAVE to ask— The Bronchial Forests, I noticed there were a few enclosed restrooms. I wonder, is there any information on where and what they did with human waste inside the park, especially in a system like lungs?

Restrooms within the park (both those found within larger structures like ranger stations as well as stand-alone restroom structures along trails) all feature active plumbing connections for wastewater removal as well as freshwater supply. Strict guidelines regarding policies for waste disposal within the venterial environment had been in place from the beginning of federal management of the park in the late 70s. A complex system of pumps and lifting stations collected wastewater before transporting it to a water treatment & reclamation facility adjacent to the support plant on the surface.

@bub14dog-blog asked:

Have any discoveries been made about the Dermal Layer?

As discovered during surface borehole drilling operations, the typical dermal thickness of the Superorganism is much greater than the entry orifice zones would otherwise seem to indicate. On average, the outer layer of the Superorganism consists of several dozen layers of dynamically-oriented cartilage plates, interlaced with dense networks of carbon-rich connective tissues which brings the overall average thickness to well over 300ft. Diamond-embedded carbide bits were required to successfully drill through this outer carapace, but the process was tedious and costly as it necessitated the sacrifice of multiple tooling bits and weeks of labor to bore a single 6” hole.

@rin-aldrin asked:

Has anything resembling ambulatory organs or limbs been discovered at the edges of the Superorganism? If not are there any theories of how it would move if/when it wakes up.

Yes. These “limbs” are responsible for bioseismic movements monitored by the United States Geological Survey. Because of this movement, more is generally known about the gross anatomical form of this part of the Superorganism than sections above or below these limbs, though geobiologists have known for decades that the organism consists of a large “mantle” which sits above the five primary limbs. Below is an artist's rendition of what the Permian Basin Superorganism might look like if it ever became fully active and ambulatory:

Artist’s depiction of a fully ambulatory Immanis colosseus. 

@schwulerschmetterling asked:

I couldn't help but notice on the map, and now I'm quite curious. What is the "hall of horrors"? Judging by the fact that it's on an un-reinforced trail and isn't marked as park infrastructure  suggests it's  a natural  formation. Also, it seems to be marked as an area to be quiet. What exactly is it?

It's no mistake that there isn't much information to be known about the “Hall of Horrors”. To even get there required a very strenuous hike by experienced, adventurous visitors. Perhaps in an attempt to preserve the mystique of the area, all who have seen it politely refrain from describing it in any meaningful way, insisting instead that it should be experienced in-person.

@darbussy asked:

Does the pit have teeth or does stuff fall down to get digested by the acids in the stomach?

While lifeforms have fallen into entry orifices shortly before being consumed, venteriologists believe this is more of a response to accidental incursion of foreign wildlife than a deliberate feeding mechanism. Instead, scientists have observed that the Superorganism requires a relatively small amount of organic tissue matter for its day-to-day metabolic processes. However, the volume of organic tissues “in reserve” required to sustain this leads many venteriologists to speculate that the Superorganism operates on extremely long feeding cycles many hundreds of millions of years in length. Fossil & bone evidence found within the gastric systems of the Pit supports a theory that the Superorganism was aquatic at a previous point in its life, and utilized an as-yet-unknown feeding mechanism to filter an entire ocean out of its large, tissue-rich organisms through this mechanism and into digestion and storage organs. This is also the working hypothesis for the prehistoric whale carcass found within the park.

@lagartija-69 asked:

What would happen if you filled a dump truck full of red bull or something and put it in the pit?

If the scale of the containment operations are any indication, I would imagine that you could dump a hundred dump trucks' worth of red bull into the Mystery Flesh Pit and might not receive any satisfactory response.

@mooncandy10101 asked:

Would you think the park could ever reopen?

Of course, I think it is inevitable unless it kills us all first.

@vv-i-o-l-e-tt asked:

Purely out of curiosity is there any particular reason that cave cooper the mascot so closely resembles that orange devil of home improvement, Homer the Home Depot mascot guy

If I had to speculate, I would guess that an untalented hack illustrator, beleaguered with the task of coming up with a silly looking mascot over a short period of time (say, for example, a lunch break), did the lazy thing and just traced an existing silly looking mascot. But no one knows for sure.  

stinkw333d asked:

does the creature have a singular heart? or is it multiple smaller systems throughout the body like the nervous system/brain?

The vascular systems of the Superorganism are distributed in a way similar to the nervous system, though not as neatly organized. The Flesh Pit contains many separate but interdependent circulatory systems. This diagram may be helpful:

bandit--6 asked:

Was there ever any protest or push back from Animal rights groups or environmentalist after the discovery of the pit? I've read through the blog and haven't seen talk of any such event, I may have missed it. Part of me can just see them trying to keeping the equipment from entering.

There were in the late 1970s, though such efforts were and continued to be uncoordinated. It's worth noting that the exact nature of the Mystery Flesh Pit was not well known by the general public, and many did not view it as an “animal” at all. The fractured and sporadic nature of what protests did occur largely led to a decreasing awareness until post-2007, when the issue received substantially more attention.

anonymous asked: 

Were there any plans to expand the park further or do any other crazy things like the resort in the gastric sea?

In the early 2000s there was an effort to open a “2nd gate” at one of the entry orifices that was much closer to the Midland/Odessa metropolitan area. Guests would have descended the entry orifice via an articulated elevator to a second Lower Visitor Center. A high-speed monorail would have connected this second resort to the main National Park complex, but the project never made it beyond the concept phase. 

@arcticsirius asked:

If the moving of flesh is such an issue, would it be possible to make a base inside a bone-structure of the organism or have bones not been found as of yet?

One of the main principles in venterial engineering is the establishment of anchor points wherever possible. For this reason, many larger pieces of infrastructure (ranger stations, utility facilities, mining facilities) are built within/near skeletal or other rigid tissues. Additionally, it is essential that any venterial survey conducted of an area of the fleshscape have at least three reference points on/within a bony or rigid tissue body by which to gauge movement of the surrounding viscera.

@a-gucci-household asked:

Can we hear more about the “Marrow Folk”? What cause this rumor to pop up? Is there any substance to these claims?

@scarfanon asked:

Given that the Permean Basin Superorganism was discovered by accident during a mining excavation, is it possible that more than one of these creatures exist?  Perhaps one was responsible for the Bloop recording, or may be lying dormant within the Yellowstone supervolcano.

This was an issue of concern in the years following the discovery, but no evidence of another Superorganism, or at least no evidence of one anywhere close to the size of the Permian Basin Superorganism, has been located domestically or abroad.

@eldritchdraaks asked:

What quarter of 2022 or even 2023 can the MFP book be potentially expected to be made available to the public?

And @bigorangemooseman asked:

Progress on the book? And where one would be able to purchase?

Early-to-mid 2023 is a generous date that I aim to have something out by, but as I am attempting to publish the book traditionally, this of course will most likely change. I am still in the process of finishing the writing portion for the book, so I have not yet formally reached out to any literary agents or publishers, but will update my progress when I begin that process on my Patreon page.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Those of us who’ve grown up in industrial societies have been taught our whole lives that GDP growth is essential to everyone’s well-being and quality of life. This quasi-religious belief in the goodness of growth persists despite numerous studies published over the past three decades demonstrating that once people’s essential needs have been met, further GDP growth does not increase life satisfaction. This disconnect between a nation’s overall economic growth and its residents’ quality of life is hardly surprising when we look at the United States, where the bulk of the wealth generated in recent decades has been captured and accumulated by only a tiny minority. As of last year, the wealthiest 1 percent owned one-third of the nation’s total household wealth, while 50 percent of households in the lower half of the wealth scale held only about 3 percent. Many of those households had no net wealth at all, and growth is doing nothing to help them. Of the new wealth that’s been generated since the depths of the Great Recession in 2009, the richest 10 percent have accumulated 75 times as much per household as have those at the bottom 50 percent. (In this graph on the Federal Reserve’s website, you really have to squint to see the bottom 50 percent’s share, in pink.) To restate the above more succinctly: in an affluent country, money can’t buy you happiness, but having a lot of money does help you acquire even more. And that’s always to the detriment of humanity, ecosystems, and our collective future. Despite the fact that economic growth has plunged us into an ecological emergency, and even though half the US population does not share meaningfully in the wealth that it produces, almost anyone you ask will express a positive view of economic growth, and most people will recoil at even the mildest suggestion that the time has come for degrowth. To help dispel the ingrained perception that growth is good and  degrowth bad, the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel has invoked an apt analogy: Take the words colonization and decolonization, for example. We know that those who engaged in colonization felt it was a good thing. From their perspective—which was the dominant perspective in Europe for most of the past 500 years—decolonization would therefore seem negative. But the point is precisely to challenge the dominant perspective, because the dominant perspective is wrong. Indeed, today we can agree that this stance—a stance against colonization—is correct and valuable: we stand against colonization and believe that the world would be better without it. That is not a negative vision, but positive; one that’s worth rallying around. Similarly, we can and should aspire to an economy without growth just as we aspire to a world without colonization. Hickel, Parrique, and other degrowth scholars stress that it is wealthy countries that need to undergo degrowth. What the rich nations are calling “growth,” he writes, is in reality “a process of elite accumulation, the commodification of commons, and the appropriation of human labor and natural resources—a process that is quite often colonial in character.” Those are the aspects of today’s economy that need to degrow, along with wasteful and superfluous production, not the essential goods and services that can ensure a decent life for all. The obligation to reduce material production and ecological degradation rests with the rich nations, and with rich populations in the rest of the world. Parrique showed another graphic at the conference illustrating how economies with “unsustainable prosperity,” like that of the US, must shrink, while economically deprived economies should be guaranteed the means and opportunity to build and transform.

[innominaterifter]

Question regarding the cockroaches: are they clean? I've always understood bugs to be fairly dirty, but given how you handle them it seems that isn't the case? Are these ones different because they're handled regularly?

These cockroaches are artificially bred in closed conditions and do not come into contact with anything outside their container.

Cockroaches that live in an open environment can indeed be unsafe since they come into contact with unpredictable substances. The main danger is caused by cockroaches that feed on human waste. Cockroaches, which prefer to feed on waste, are capable of carrying pathogens such as hepatitis, tuberculosis, gastrointestinal infections, pneumonia, meningitis and others. In addition to viruses and microorganisms, cockroaches can carry the eggs of helminths (worms) and amoebas on their bodies. The reason for their unsafety is that they come into contact with and eat completely different human waste and animal carrion. You cannot know what exactly this or that cockroach came into contact with.

Unlike this situation, the living conditions of my insects are completely controlled only by me.

To keep insects, I use either a substrate that I buy in the store or cardboard egg cartons (cockroaches love to hide in them). For their food, I use a variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, oatmeal, and supplements from pet stores.

Cockroaches also love lichens, which can be found on tree branches (and lichens are very useful for them). But before giving them, I first freeze these branches in the freezer to destroy all possible living organisms that could be there.

Of course, I collect these twigs in the forest, and not near the city or in garden plots, because trees growing in an urban environment can be treated with chemicals against insects. And then I just risk killing my cockroaches.

I also monitor their condition and appearance so that they look healthy.

Some time ago I had a bad experience with excessively high humidity in their container and part of the colony was affected by mold, which could be visually observed on their shells. This mold is safe for humans, but insects can die from it. So I had to save the colony.

In addition to completely cleaning the container and contents, I needed to do something about the mold on the cockroaches themselves. My good friend was visiting me at the time and I asked her for help in this strange matter.

I am very glad to have such a friend to whom I can say “Code red, we urgently need to wash the cockroaches’ asses!�� and hear in response “Ok, give me 5 minutes to finish my tea, and let’s go!”.

As a result, we first washed them under ordinary water in bulk, then wiped the shell of each individual cockroach with a cotton pad soaked in a disinfecting solution and the mold was defeated.

But I repeat: this mold was safe for humans. Thus, if you keep insects in closed containers and they do not come into contact with or eat anything from the outside world without undergoing treatment, then all ok.

What can create difficulties is a possible allergy to cockroach chitin. Moreover, this allergy can manifest itself only to some types of cockroaches, but not to others.

This allergy is treated with conventional remedies prescribed by a dermatologist. But of course, you should stop contact with the type of cockroaches that you have allergy (or protect the respiratory tract, mucous membranes, and not allowing contact with the skin).

In general, the rules for handling domestic insects are approximately the same as for pets. Some may be allergic to cats or dogs, others may not. It is safe from the point of view of disease to handle domestic rats or hamsters, but it is clearly not worth handling rats or hamsters that live in the wild¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[supervillainarchaeologist]

Superhero Movie Fatigue Thoughts...

The seemingly infinite obsession people have with thinking the Russos are an authority on all things comic book film means of course they've been forced to wade in on this never-ending conversation about "what's gone wrong." For what it's worth, I thought their answer was fairly diplomatic and anyone who has been following me even briefly knows it costs me QUITE a lot to compliment them (to be honest, Winter Soldier was definitely very good) but they do have a point. I think they're only part-right that viewing habits between generations is to blame, but they were hardly likely to be more frank and say "yeah the recent offerings have been absolute ass" when they're more famous than they could ever dream of being due to Marvel/Disney. Before I get into my own relationship with comic book films I need to give some other context: I am genuinely a film fan in general and the lack of choice some months in the cinema thanks to Marvel Release #367 has started to annoy me. Sometimes there'll be a different film I want to see and it's a case of blink and you'll miss it. Life gets in the way and you didn't find the time to go to the cinema for that one six hour window it was actually playing. I know this seems pretty rich coming from someone who mostly blogs about Loki and other science fiction/fantasy stuff but I do genuinely love films. Despite the existence of streaming my husband and I have a huge Blu-ray and DVD collection. We want more original content at the cinema. I really enjoyed Barbenheimer last year, I can't remember the last time I wanted to go to the cinema for a double feature before then - I think it was 2019! I know there are ways you can criticise that phenomenon too but it felt like an organic build up to something that was a lot of fun and, depending on your view point, you got to see 1 or 2 pretty good films out of it. Christopher Nolan has this whole counter movement and counter-counter movement surrounding him that isn't exactly unearned (I'm boring and fall in the middle, he's got good and bad points) but Oppenheimer was a genuinely great film in my opinion. It didn't feel like three hours and the main performances were all outstanding. By contrast I remember feeling every minute of Endgame's run time. That's not me saying I can't sit for three hours, that's me saying that I think my brain was simply done with the Infinity Saga by that point. (Going to put this under a cut because it's getting quite long...)

Now to circle that back to what the Russos were saying, I do think a lot of folk in my generation basically decided Endgame was a good time to check out. Many of us had seen the bulk of any comic book releases between circa 2000 and 2019, that's from childhood/teens through a lot of life changes. It's not that we don't necessarily love comic book films any more, it's that you become a bit more time poor as you get older for various reasons and you're maybe a bit more choosy about what you are willing to schedule among everything else in your life. Personally I don't have my own kids but I have family (mine and my husband's) scattered all over England and Scotland (which requires a lot of time to visit them) and I've become busier at work over the last five years. A lot of my tumblr posting happens during evenings/weekends or in a flurry when I'm on a tea break. I got to the point with the MCU where I realised that I was getting attached to characters and storylines and canon was just never going to give me the things I wanted. You accept this is part of following fiction btw, it's just that I took the view "what's the point in wasting my time on something that isn't bringing me the joy it once did?" Hence I decided I would no longer go to the cinema for every Marvel release regardless of how good it allegedly was - quality didn't factor in my decision, I think "maybe I'll watch it on Disney+" - which is what I did with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol3. The other thing in the equation is that over that 19-20 year period I mentioned I think people forget that there were other non-MCU films where there's a LOT of drek. I have never enjoyed a Fantastic Four film. The X-Men and original Spider-Man trilogies seemed to fall off a cliff during their third entries and my personal take on that is that both of those third films are overstuffed with references and characters and they also contain stupid decisions like doing the Dark Phoenix saga yet killing Cyclops. At the same time, and speaking of Christopher Nolan, I will always love the Dark Knight trilogy even though TDKR skirts around that third-movie disappointment thing. The MCU felt so much different for a while because even when there were films that maybe felt not quite as good as some of the others, it still managed to pull you in and make you care. But I always knew there was a point where it would start groaning under its own weight and although some people point to the Multiverse Sage I feel it was already happening in Phase 3. Just think of how many characters were on the posters/general promo for Endgame - how many of those characters were in the entire run time for probably less than a dozen or so minutes? It was just too much. But you forgave it because you were invested in seeing how it ended. And then it ended, pissing some people off in the process, and you're surprised that a lot of the audience just doesn't want to do this any more? You know what else this reminds me of... ...welcome to comic books Marvel Studios. You have finally created a wholly authentic page to screen experience right down to people getting fed up of keeping up with everything. I guarantee now the original actors are aging out of their roles you're considering blowing it all up aren't you? Aren't you?! So yes, the Russos are maybe right that younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha would rather consume things instantly in their own time than gather around for event TV/films. But considering that many of us across the generations are into older media and technology (e.g. collecting physical media) I know from observing the audience at my screening of Barbie that there are younger folk who would go to the cinema for an event film...it's just that maybe the MCU defined their childhood in the way the older comic book films (and I mean stuff from earlier than the 00s too, things that were on TV on a Saturday afternoon!) did for me and now that chapter of their life is a nice memory to look back on - they maybe just can't be bothered with going through all that again.

[k00294664]

Radius update.

As a group , my peers and I decided on a collection of 3D sculptures to express our ideas. We wanted to represent the people of Limerick and their inner attraction to spots of nature within the city. We hope to achieve this through a human model sitting with nature in opposition to a tree made from plastic rubbish and other waste material.

I took photos of my friend Patrick as reference for the human model. We chose the pose of him cradling his leg as we felt it best represented the vulnerability of people. I personally think it adds an intimate feeling to the piece.

I began the model using a wire frame to create an armature. I added newspaper to the armature to bulk up the model and make it more human-like.

[hireskipbinadelaide-blog]

What Factors Influence the Cost of Rubbish Removal Services?

Neat and clean surroundings are what everyone loves to see, but a sad fact here is that no one wants to invest time and money in cleanliness and timely rubbish removal. They are ready to seek services from a waste management company and pay their fees. The question is how much it costs to remove this rubbish. Let us find the answer to this question in this blog post.

What Is The Cost Of Rubbish Removal Services?

The cost of seeking these services will depend on several factors, as different options are available in Australia. These options will influence the expenditure, and the first of them is the private collector.

Private Collectors

These are rubbish removal companies owned and run by rubbish removal experts. They offer rubbish waste removal services, and the median price is between $150 and $200. The cost will get influenced by the type of rubbish and the quantity, of course.

Skip Bins

In terms of rubbish removal, this is considered a relatively expensive option because you hire a skip bin, and once it is full, the rubbish removal company will pick it up. The average cost of a two cubic metre skip bin is around $250 to $300.

Diy Dumping

This is the cheapest but labour-intensive one as you must take your garbage to the nearest dumping yard. In these dumping yards, the dumping cost is determined by several factors. For dry materials, the cost is between $350 and $400, and for garden materials, the exact price is around $250.

Council Pick-Up

This is the free-of-cost service offered by the local municipality or the council body. These people collect garbage once a week, and as mentioned above, it is entirely free of cost. However, you must book the pick-up in advance and remember that the demand is always very high. They can take only three types of garbage like mattresses, old furniture and white goods. It will be your responsibility to park the garbage box on the street before the pick-up.

What Factors Influence The Cost Of Rubbish Removal Services?

Of course, the type of garbage you want to dump is the most significant factor, followed by others. Firstly, the amount of waste will influence the cost of any abovementioned services. Then, the location from where the waste material has to be picked will be a significant factor in determining the cost of rubbish removal services. The cost of these services also varies from company to company, and often rubbish removal experts consider the location factor.

[soloau21]

Discover the efficient way to manage bulk waste with Solo Resource Recovery. Our expert team ensures hassle-free bulk waste collection services, promoting sustainability and cleanliness in your community. Trust Solo for reliable waste solutions.

[lunarsilkscreen]

Value of Money

"When demand on [currency] goes up, its value goes down." - shameless self quote

I've written at length about the axiom I'm claiming to have invented. Now; I wanna go into the chain of events that lead to this axiom.

Many will decry Bernie Sander's and the Democrats, and socialists, and liberal media for using [minimum wage increase] as a key position. This is because arguably; the price of the things that those living on minimum wage might buy will increase in value.

Like food stuffs; which doesn't increase in purchase rates when consumers have more money to spend. It increases in price when it costs more to produce. However; a lot of food {nearly half in America} goes to waste (it goes bad before use). Which suggests; that farmers overproduce expecting that most of their produce goes to waste.

This ensures that ingredients are really available when you or I go to purchase them. Prices on unprocessed raw ingredients and bulk foodstuffs remain fairly stagnant. Because most prices that Farmers have to pay are to their corporate overlords, like Monsanto, or their local credit Union. (And to a lesser extent property taxes on land zoned for agriculture)

What we are seeing now isn't a price hike on the low end raw ingredients; but on processed foods, sodas, alcohol, fish, meat and dairy.

Why is this?

Well; we must first ask: why are those working minimum wage jobs asking for wage increases at all?

This has to do with the total cost of living. Electric and water prices remain a concern for your average person; and since the entire world is digital now; electricity usage rates are at an all time high.

Then the fact that the housing market is at an all time high, and prices to rent, along with discerning landlords; means that the bottleneck is at these prices (housing) overall, and to a lesser extent; prices of food that pay money to individuals who work in the supply chain after it leaves the farm.

Brand new video games after all are still 15-60$. So it's not entertainment's fault. Tesla might've increased the cost of their newest car; but that's more likely because Tesla's sales overall have dropped.

The value of money drops when demand on it increases.

What causes higher demand on currency? One could say that it's greedy people being greedy. Asking for more money because they can and that's it. They want the latest iPhone and Tesla Truck! Every year! (As opposed to when you need to buy one and can afford new)

It's not that. It's Debt. When the bank comes knocking, then the Lendees (the ones who borrowed money) need to pay it back; and before you go off on college students who are still working minimum wage because jobs can't afford to hire them; remember--This is affecting corporations like Tesla, Apple, Google, and Disney

All of who have cut back spending, and are still having trouble meeting their obligations.

(But record profits!)

Profits include money made over money spent, but not necessarily money borrowed. Because money borrowed is an operating cost. With a monthly payment to repay the loan; record profits could be made, and the company still needs to worry about paying back that loan.

Which means they (the corporations) expect sales to continue decreasing.

The National Debt (the amount of money currently in circulation, including bonds and other obligations) is *not* the same as the cumulative debt in the nation (the total amount of debt held by individuals and company's and any-entity-else the banks have lent to) which is a far more important indicator.

The National Debt goes down as tax money is collected and returned to the federal government. But the cumulative debt only goes down as people make a profit, and pay theirs back. This includes workers at minimum wage (who need to afford homes and a vehicle to get to work on time, or a bus pass if they live near a bus station that also goes to their place of work.)

Web search about the ease (or difficulty) to get a loan right now returns results like this article from CNN that talks about the decrease of loans being given out. Loan rejections are up for people with low indicator of default (failure to make payments.)

The banks aren't giving money as freely because they also have met their limits. And so we have this [inflation] issue. Debts can't be paid, so people raise prices in order to pay their debts on time; rising prices mean less sales, less sales mean more defaults, and the cycle continues.

Which again suggests outright; demand on currency is high. Demand on goods? Very low. Luxury Goods? Even lower.

Will increasing minimum wage help? Will forgiving debts? Will we be able to escape this black hole? Find out on the next episode of; "Somehow the entire world is in debt to itself, and it can't pay itself back."

[mwolf0epsilon]

The Umbaran Pathogen - Day 17: Hypothermia

Summary: Fives, Kix and Rex arrive at the medical facility first, which doesn't help them all that much considering they have no idea what they are looking for.

Warning: N/A

Prev / Next

[In which the events on Umbara are worsened by an unknown pathogen taking hold of both the 501st and 212th. These series of drabbles will follow a non-linear timeline based on the AI-less Whumptober prompt list for 2023.]

THIS STORY IS ALSO ON AO3

---

"It's freezing in here..." Rex hissed between chattering teeth, immediately regretting having taken off his bucket as soon as they entered the Umbaran medical facility.

The Captain was right too. The quick preliminary scans that Fives had done upon the trio sneaking in, revealed that the entire building was at almost sub-zero levels of cold. For what reason, he couldn't be sure, but it probably had something to do about storing bacterial culture samples or whatever the hell it was that natborn doctors did with the stuff they collected off their patients during tests.

He had already lived through a lifetime of medical tests performed by plenty of Long-Necks and Droids, that didn't particularly care about his or his vode's comfort during said procedures. He didn't really need to know what the nattie docs got up to outside of the war efforts.

"Put your helmet back on." Kix ordered as he uneasily looked around the hall they'd ended up in, after climbing out of the dusty ventilation system. "Your armor's thermal regulation system should keep you from freezing your shebs off."

"Tell me something I don't know..." The blond grumbled as he put his bucket back on, sighing in relief as the bitter cold was chased away in mere instants. "Much better... But moving on, we need to find a floor plan for this place..."

A wise idea, as they couldn't waste time running around blindly. If they got their hands on a map of the facility's various floors, they'd be able to find what they were looking for much faster, rather than risk getting lost in a maze of recovery areas, operation theaters, or even storage closets.

There was no telling how long they'd have before General Kenobi and the 212th could no longer stall for them, and with no word from Coric's group things were starting to look a little grim.

Getting to the facility itself had been a struggle. Between hiding from the Umbaran scouting parties, avoiding the aggressive wildlife, and keeping an eye out for the infected, the journey had been a constant uphill battle where they couldn't even resort to using their blasters. Unwilling to bring unwanted attention to their positions.

Given that they hadn't encountered the other medics, they assumed the others were struggling just as terribly. If not worse. They had no idea if they'd escaped from the base unscathed. For all they knew, Coric, Pitch, Twitch and Sponge had already been caught. Or worse...

And with only a vague idea that they needed to access a database to seek out some critical (but not very explicitly elaborated upon) information, the trio really wasn't all that prepared for this sort of excursion.

One medic would definitely not be enough, should they find a cure. That much they figured, considering the number of infected troopers in the 501st alone. Kix wouldn't be able to tackle the issue on his own.

"You think the others are ok?" Fives asked as he looked around, somewhat unsure if the way they'd chosen to go first would get them anywhere of use. He was walking slowly, steps as light as the bulk of his armor would allow, keeping an ear out for trouble.

"They're tough." Rex nodded slowly. Trying to be optimistic, considering he knew how frighteningly stubborn the medics could be, but still coming off as somewhat unsure in the end. The circumstances weren't easy ones after all. "They're probably just being careful, like we were..."

"Yeah... Yeah probably." The ARC nodded back, before motioning for the other two to stop near a corner where the hallway turned. He had a very quick look, and then gave them the all clear. Moving just a bit quicker now that he had a goal in sight.

Down the hall was a flight of emergency stairs. Besides it, attached to the wall as per standard safety regulations, was the digital emergency floor plan. The three rushed forward to have a look, barely containing their elation as they realized the interactive floor plan had pages that displayed the other floor layouts.

Thumbing through the available information, they saw exactly what they were looking for. The main datahub, which would contain all kinds of data-banks stock full of useful medical information.

"Basement floor." Fives groaned. "Of course the dang thing is in the creepy basement..."

"Not so much creepy, as probably absolutely frozen over..." Kix shook his head in disbelief. Sounding somewhat put-off at the possibility of facing even lower temperatures. "The entire basement of this huge building is dedicated to computers and the server banks. The amount of heat generated would need to be mitigated by considerably frigid mini-climate..."

"Kix, it's already pretty cold out here. I doubt the basement will be much worse..." Rex pointed out. "That said, if it IS worse, we should be as quick as possible. Even if our armor will protect us from the bitter cold, it won't do us any good if we stall and end up overworking the thermo regulation system. We'd freeze on the spot."

"Wouldn't want a case of frostbitten tootsies." Fives nodded, sounding morbidly amused at the idea. "Or hypothermia."

"If there ever was a place to catch your death, I suppose a hospital isn't the worst of options..." The medic responded with his own amusement.

They carried on, hoping their fellow troopers would meet with them soon. They could really use some help looking for the correct data at least... Hopefully the cause for their delay was indeed caution.

[moonjxsung]

OMG the pochacco pc holder 🥺🥺 ive been looking at buying more pc holders since i only have like.. one LMAO but the one you have is saur cute might just have to snag one 🤭 im also very curious!!! how many pcs do you have and what are ur faves!! :0

YESSS I always buy mine from either local kpop stores or in bulk on amazon and I switch out my holders/pcs on a daily basis so nothing gets wasted!! I will not let my pcs sit and rot 😤🤞

as for PCs…. I think as of now I have roughly 400 (definitely give or take a few) but this is also including my bts dicon which easily adds like 100 to my collection. Here are some of my fav pcs as of now but truthfully they change a lot, not to mention practically every Han/Felix pc is my favorite so it’s insanely hard to pick 😭

(I can’t get a good pic of my hobi pob so that last pic isn’t mine but it’s probably my favorite pc of all time !!)

Pcs: Han noeasy, Han Mahagrid r4, Felix rockstar Apple Music pob, Felix pilot JYP exclusive, Jimin deco kit, Onew hard, Xiumin exist, Lee Know noeasy, hobi butter pob 👼🫶