The future involves waking up again, and sleep makes us rested enough to deal with that.

Simples.

I had this book when I was a kid.

Yes I’m old.

call the police?

you’re doomed, then.

Do a shot of vinegar. Works every time.

Stick it in the oven for an hour, right on the rack, as-is.

Take it out, cut in half, butter/salt/pepper.

So when is the rest of the world putting sanctions on El Salvador?

They’re just setting the tarriff to half the ‘trade deficit’ percentage.

Where the actual trade amount is trivial, this leads to ludicrous results.

You’re always going to a chunk of political support by oppressing minorities, anyone considered ‘other’. A percentage of people are always going to hate, mistrust and blame the out-group for everything wrong with their lives, and this makes them very easy to lead round by the nose.

Stoke enough hatred, and people will gladly give up due process, human rights and social equity in the name of oppressing those they see as the enemy.

And once you can do that, large corporations can exploit the absolute shit out of the population, way harder than they could with all those pesky laws, regulations, oversight, etc. They can use slave labour from the concentration camps, steal the land and wealth from the people they kill or imprison, and they can rewrite laws to suit themselves, secure in the knowledge that anyone opposing them can simply be disappeared off the streets.

A bunch of Americans pronounce it sen-tar for some reason that I’ve never understood.

sen-tor

As in taurus, which rhymes with torus.

how slow acting? As in months, or as in time to get the fuck outta dodge?

Ricin will kill you in a couple of days, was first extracted in 1888, and the plant grows in the mediterranean.

Only half of them are.

The rest are even.

Malazan / Discworld.

Just about any pair of characters would be amazing.

I worked for a company once that installed a remote-activation killswitch in their drivers, as a secret weapon to force the customer to stay current on their maintenance contract.

The CEO was a fuckup however, and the code killed their system even without being activated - resulting in a bunch of angry phonecalls and some of the most egregious lying I’ve ever heard.

god, he was a piece of shit

Until he dies, you say?

Interesting.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen, by Steven Erikson.

Ten brick-thick volumes that will alternately fill your heart to bursting then stomp on it until you’re wrung out like a rag. It is one HELL of a ride. It does have a steep immersion curve, so be prepared to take a couple of attempts to finish the first one.

When you find yourself laughing at the tragedy and crying at the jokes, you’ll know.

Also, the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. Adorkable romance, badass as hell, will break you. Gets increasingly weird as it goes along. Is good, has massive cult following.

And by no means least, the Machineries of Empire series by Yoon Ha Lee. Ostensibly weird Korean military space opera, but with a real gut punch; you won’t forget this one.

One at the white house, one at the sun.

NPD and BPD are both driven by an eternal sucking void of insecurity and negative self-esteem that can never be filled.

Narcissists try to fill it with praise and social status, or failing that, power and subjugation.

Borderlines try to fill it with limerence and victimhood or failing that, revenge.

But it can’t ever be filled - it’s worse than addiction, worse than being underwater in some shitty MLM scheme. It takes and takes and takes because fuck you, pay me.

So they don’t have friends or loved ones, they have hosts. They suck out all the goodness until there’s nothing left to give, then they start in on the pain.

Assholes, in the other hand, are just driven by simple greed, callousness and lack of consideration. They can and do still hurt people of course, but it’s not an all-consuming obsessive need.

I use bullet points; they probably learned it from me. Sorry.