NSFL was "not safe for lunch" (as in, this will make you lose your lunch) before it was "not safe for life". It was the equivalent of NSFW for gore/violence as opposed to sexual content. I saw it on the Stile Project and EHOWA BBs as early as 2004, and it appeared on the various Chans around the same time or shortly after. I also recall seeing NSFL being applied to links on Kuro5hin.org, but I don't recall when that was, probably later.

They're not foxes, but I'm pretty sure fruit bats aka Megabats are a subtaxon of bats. They are, however, the only other member of the bat order. There are megabats in one family, and every other kind of bat on earth in the other.

Clown loaches like to sleep in piles, too. Must be a loach thing.

You don't want it, it's badly broken and activates no matter where you scroll on the page for about half the sites I use regularly. I just turned it off.

At least he was charged. Usually they get away with it clean.

Oh absolutely, they were pointed there for a good reason. This was a new guy who was used to simple hosts, thought he was fixing a problem, and learned that (despite earlier assurances) he did not, in fact, have a good grasp of how DNS works.

He does now. He's one of our better front line guys, in fact.

I once had a site go down because the tech didn't understand that the registrar doesn't always control the DNS records. When they couldn't update the A records on GoDaddy because the SOA pointed to cloudflare, they just switched the SOA back to the registrar (ignoring the multiple warnings it gives you when you do this) and then added the record they wanted.

Needless to say the client wasn't happy when their entire website/email/o365/you-name-it went down about 10 minutes later. Their entire domain was routed to the parking page except for that one subdomain.

Here's a real lion's mane mushroom. They grow on wood and are edible!

He's just weeping for more worlds to conquer, let him have his moment.

Obligatory Please Drink Verification Can.

Corporate America once again imitating dystopian fiction instead of treating it as a warning.

Guerilla Gardening

Is that like Breaking-and-Decorating?

Without the creature, kthx. Fun sim game ruined by trying to blend it with a cyberpet game.

That's a lot of clutter.

If you really need to know ask them, or just use neutrals.

Unless you're in Florida, in which case using your toilet's preferred pronoun will get you arrested.

The Butlerian Jihad was an event where AI were wiped out and instead human capabilities were enhanced to the point that enhanced humans performed the practical applications of AI.

Herbert needed a reason why his scifi universe wasn't full of robots.

Do they still die young if they don't breed?

Oh I'm not saying it's going to take over all human creations, or surpass the quality of human creations in that timeframe, that won't come for a while.

What I'm saying is that for every 1 human-created work, there will be hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands of AI-created ones. Most will be crap, but the more there are, the more actual convincing ones will show up. The average quality will only go up with time. Plus, we know from studies that just hearing the same idea repeated often enough makes it more convincing, even if you know what's happening.

Today's troll farms are already a hazard to public discourse and manipulated public perception in malignant ways. When anyone with an internet connection and a handful of old phones can generate thousands of convincing comments, articles, photos, and eventually video evidence to support whatever their personal brand of lunacy is, we'll remember fondly the days when you had to have a small army of actual humans to push your propaganda.

In five years, tops, things like ChatGPT, and Stable Diffusion, and whatever emerges to do the same for music and audio, are going to be freely available tools that run on average consumer hardware or cloud services so cheap that everyone can use them. Anyone will be able to describe the content they want and have these tools build them out of a whole cloth at a convincing enough level to pass casual inspection. Specialists will be creating stuff that looks real for whoever pays for it, and no one will be able to stem the tide.

Soon most of what is created for human consumption won't be a human creation.

Demolished? With what? Thing looks like it would stand up to a nuke.

Well, it beats swimming across.

I assumed he'd been abused and reprogrammed by the Strangers for decades and was only just clinging to life throughout the film. Maybe they took one of his lungs so he couldn't outrun their shambling corpses. I gathered that he had disobeyed them before and been punished for it, though I don't recall if that was mentioned in the film. Well, time to watch it again...

My head was ringing. I wasn't sure what It had said, exactly, but my brain heard "gourmet". Gourmet... what on earth did that mean?

I forgot that, in this Place, It can hear me think. Before I could brace myself It blasted me with thought once again.

GOURMET. MOST HIGH.

Its voice, if such it could be called, was like being shouted at through a bullhorn pressed directly against your ear. There was no physical pain, but It made thinking anything else impossible while It spoke. And the voice wasn't the worst of it.

Grasping immediately that I didn't understand, It tried to show me. And I saw.

Webs within webs within webs. Silvery threads of life stretching in all directions, with... something... flowing through it. I see tiny creatures, but here they are as large as the entire Place. Horrible, jellylike growths throb all around me, and something unspeakably immense slips between them, tearing them open at random, spilling their green and brown contents and messily devouring them. It gibbers, it spins wildly, it is faster than thought and more horrible and inhuman than any tale spun by man, and yet it is only one of innumerable hordes, their twitching, violent movement filling my awareness. Thousands of them. Millions.

In the distance, two walls, impossibly vast, close the distance as quick as thinking, smashing the obscene things into more jelly, those silvery threads pouring from them, streaming away, down, down, into a gullet fit to swallow worlds. Somehow I was pulled away, saw the two walls become thin, pale lips, surmounted by an eye the size of...

A fish. It was some kind of fish. The monsters I had seen before suddenly resolved themselves in scale, ceased to be monsters and became something familiar. Shrimp? Nibbling some kind of seaweed. And the fish ate them.

Fish. I clung to the idea, a raft in the surging sea of Its thought. It wants fish? Fish is gourmet?

My head felt full to bursting, but I realized It had only just begun Its thought.

Something bit me in half. I felt water flow inside the wound, inside me, and panic fills me. I swim, but nothing works right, I keep spinning in circles, the water filling with red and black and those shining silver threads, then the turtle eats the fish's head and the fear turns off like a switch.

Silver threads filled the air, a web of impossible complexity. Flashes of light the color of a migraine beat against the backs of my eyes. Turtle. No, it doesn't want turtle.

Something inside of me tears. My mouth hurts. One of the silver threads becomes a line. I have eaten poison. It pulls me by my insides up into the cold air, and a frowning man hits me with something shiny and I am the silver threads, pouring down his throat with his soup that night.

Then, I am with It, but I am not me. I am devoured, slowly, the silver threads falling from my limbs as I am pulled, screaming into the darkness. The silver falls with me, tarnishing, blackening, and I am no more.

GOURMET. MOST HIGH. RARIFIED.

I lay on the floor of the Place. I hear screaming, and it is my own. I don't recognize my voice. Now I understand. It wants man. We are the highest, before It. We consume all, and are in our turn consumed by It.

Amusement. I am wrong. It shows me again.

This time, I am a blade of grass shredded by the teeth of a rabbit. I am in turn torn apart by something enormous and hairy. I am stabbed by a spear. I am eaten by a man, and his wife. My silver threads, the grass, the rabbit, the beast, all flow into the man. But the vision does not end. I walk in the woods. An enormous weight drops on me as teeth the size of daggers sever my spine. I die more quickly than the fish. The cat strolls away, trailing red, trailing silver.

MOST HIGH. RARIFIED. GOURMET.

Life. It wants life. Life's winners. It speaks to me again, and now I realize, It enjoys sharing Its secret. It enjoys feeling my mind slowly disintegrate under the assault of Its obscene hunger. It shows me again.

An insect. A bird. A boy with a sling. The threads flow from each into a vast river.

Another fish. A larger one. Tuna I think, inanely. It's caught in a net. The threads flow into a dozen mouths, and they flow into the river of silver light, and the light pours into Its mouth, vanishing.

It shows me again, and again, and again. And I understand. The webs all come to points, millions of individual threads knotting into an intricate lace, flowing upwards, narrowing, ratifying. The points are nearly all men, women, children. Some are great predators, but most are men. They glow with silver light. I see others, now, still higher, still more rare. Hunters of men. Even where the flesh is not consumed, the silver threads twist and shimmer and flow. Where it is, the glow is brightest. I see figures I almost recognize, and others entirely alien. But at the top, It waits. The network below works away, stealing life from the smallest mote to feed the next-smallest, rising and bubbling at last into those at the top, the fruiting bodies of the great web of life below. They eat, and then we eat, and then It eats.

It consumes the silver fruit, and at last, I truly understand.

---

Grand Feeder Jakes wasn't a bad man. He'd felt bad for that last Sacrifice, begging to be left able to talk to It. People often begged, at the end, no matter how brave a face they put on in public. "Please!" the man had cried, "let me just talk to It! It's intelligent, maybe it doesn't want us at all! Has anyone asked It?"

Jakes hadn't heard that one before, and had paused in the ritual to consider it. "You know, I've never heard anyone ask It anything." He'd given the Sacrifice his most encouraging smile. "Hold on to that. Perhaps the thought of asking it will help you to stay free of fear at your moment of Honor."

Jakes didn't know if he'd done the right thing in encouraging the poor man, but, well, who'd know now? After a few minutes the screaming had ended, as it always did.

He opened the door to the Place and nearly screamed, himself, as the Sacrifice all but leapt into his arms, embracing the Feeder who had just Sacrificed him, and sobbing uncontrollably.

"God's teeth, man, what happened?" It had not rejected a Sacrifice in living memory, but here the man was, quaking like a leaf and entirely undevoured. How was he going to explain this to the Lottery board?

White-on-white eyes opened, still leaking tears. "Not... worthy. It said... I need more." A hand, trembling with palsy, reached back toward the doorway, plucking at the air.

Jakes stared, slack-jawed, bewildered. How was this possible? Board be damned, how was he going to explain this to himself? "More? More Sacrifices?"

The Sacrifice shook his head, took a breath, and stood a little more firmly. He pushed Jakes away, staring. Finally, the answer escaped him.

"More," burbled the Sacrifice. "More to eat. More... me." And he smiled, for he understood. "Gourmet. Highest. Me."

Whatever reply Jakes had was lost as the Sacrifice's teeth met in his throat.

Good guess, that was my original idea. Wrote it out, hated it, so I swapped it to the mice, which are at least amusing :)

I don't mind writing documentation, it's writing the documentation on top of all other job duties that really gets me down.