What a lot of people outside of Chicago may not realize is that The Beans are a native species to this region and right now is baby season! What you’re seeing there is probably just an instance of a young mature The Bean being kept in a secure enclosure, probably due to some kind of injury that’s being rehabbed.
In urban Chicago around this time of year if you want to go The Bean spotting you mostly just need to keep an eye out around downtown drugstores for formations like this.
I took this picture myself in a Walgreens. As you can see we have a nice healthy-looking family group consisting of a parent The Bean, several juveniles who will often stay with the parent for several years, and some newborns this year who naturally group up protectively near any large sign reading “Chicago”.
The Beans are usually extremely docile and can even be kept as pets once the juveniles separate from their family group, since they are low-maintenance and require only a small flat area such as a desk or bookshelf on which to recline. Fun fact, a group of The Beans such as pictured above is known as a Tchochki!
Are adult The Beans usually around the size of the one in the above photo? The most famous one I know of is about three humans tall. Is that a genetic rarity, or is it more like lobsters?
There’s a lot of debate in TheBean Biology circles about the massive The Bean residing in Millennium Park. It’s not known why this The Bean chose the park or why it has grown to such gargantuan size. I’m not an expert, I just live here, but I tend to agree with the newer theory that they can regularly grow to massive sizes in the wild, but we only tend to encounter smaller ones because such huge sizes generally only occur in deep freshwater lakes.
It’s certainly very unusual to see a The Bean of that size on land. Such a privilege to live in a place where they feel safe enough to take up residence alongside humans.
"...but I think legally I am, in fact, not man nor woman but a military"
Inquiring minds want to know if Gerald is in fact a military. I don't think it was ever addressed.
Also I will be cheeky and ask if we can have a snippet of future writing xD
Anonymous
For legal reasons, Gerald is indeed now a military in the eyes of the government, but since they don’t have tax allocations for military spending and both words start with M, he has been allowed to keep the M on his driver’s license, passport, national health card, etc. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens when Serafina reaches her majority…
I haven’t been writing much in the past two months simply because life’s been hectic and sometimes taking a little break can be rejuvenating, but I’m starting to put aside time to work on the new Shivadh novel so here’s a little clip from that, introducing a character we’ve only seen in short-story flashbacks before.
Because of some changes I’m making in the upcoming story (I may be shifting the central love interest), this might be highly altered the next time anyone sees it, so it’s kind of fun to share something that may not end up in the final book.
What a lot of people outside of Chicago may not realize is that The Beans are a native species to this region and right now is baby season! What you’re seeing there is probably just an instance of a young mature The Bean being kept in a secure enclosure, probably due to some kind of injury that’s being rehabbed.
In urban Chicago around this time of year if you want to go The Bean spotting you mostly just need to keep an eye out around downtown drugstores for formations like this.
I took this picture myself in a Walgreens. As you can see we have a nice healthy-looking family group consisting of a parent The Bean, several juveniles who will often stay with the parent for several years, and some newborns this year who naturally group up protectively near any large sign reading “Chicago”.
The Beans are usually extremely docile and can even be kept as pets once the juveniles separate from their family group, since they are low-maintenance and require only a small flat area such as a desk or bookshelf on which to recline. Fun fact, a group of The Beans such as pictured above is known as a Tchochki!
Do you guys remember when we thought 2016 was going to be one of the weirdest years of our lives? It’s fucking wild to me how it turned out to be just the opening scroll text of our Star Wars of weirdness.
Well, this post from March of 2020 has aged in fascinating ways.
I was innocently buying a soda and a Kit Kat bar from a snack shop recently when the cashier said, “Oh, a Kit Kat! That’s what I named my cat!” and then launched into An Monologue.
Nobody was behind me in line, which seemed to be a good reason for her to treat me to a five minute retelling of the identification, rescue, and argument over initial custody of Kit Kat, who was so small they thought when they first heard him crying for help that he was a bird and not a kitten in a tree, and is now fifteen pounds of “pure, sculpted lardass”.
And I didn’t mind, precisely, I wasn’t bored or anything, but around the time she was bringing me up to speed on Kit Kat’s current status it occurred to me that this woman is a cashier in a store that primarily sells candy bars and beverages. People must buy Kit Kat bars from her multiple times a day. Does she do this every time there’s nobody in line behind the purchaser? Did I just have that I Own Several Cats And Will Enjoy Your Cat Stories look about me? Was it the first time it occurred to her that she sold the brand of candy bar she named her cat after? Was she new to the job of selling Kit Kat bars?
The idea that every time she sees a Kit Kat bar she is gripped by the urge, Manchurian Candidate style, to retell the story of Kit Kat the Cat, elevates her from a friendly cashier to a deep enigma. Truly there is no knowing the mind of another.
I actually have some interesting analysis of responses to this post, summing up the different attempted criteria for proving or disproving the thesis, but I decided to make a collage of my favorite reactions, most of them delightfully unhinged.
Welcome to Radio Free Monday for the week of March 2, 2026. RFM posts links to peoples’ personal fundraisers asking for community assistance, on Tumblr, Dreamwidth, and the Fediverse.
This has been Radio Free Monday. Submit items for my attention through this link (use English for your submission-text, please. If necessary, use Google Translate.)
I saw a tag recently that got me thinking (dangerous) about the intersection of creativity and mental health specifically with regards to medication – someone said “Maybe I should look into Adderall, I didn’t know it would still allow me to be creative” and I was going to respond blankly encouraging, because it’s been GREAT for me, when I saw they added “Because I can’t write on the Vyvanse.”
Which is heartbreaking, but also reminded me that not everyone went from unmedicated to perfectly treated in a single step, and a lot of people still have imperfect medication. I really have very little experience with medication that impacts brain function and I’ve been mad lucky that Adderall has been seamless for me. I’ve never taken a medication that wouldn’t let me write; I’d be in severe distress if that happened. Even when I haven’t been writing much, or haven’t been writing original work, I’ve never not been writing at all for longer than a month or two at most.
So I thought, well, I could do an essay on my experience as a creative who takes Adderall. But also I could invite my readers to talk about their experiences, since many of the people who read me have used different medication, have used medication for other conditions than ADHD, and have used medication for much longer, so they have more diverse and nuanced experiences. Then I thought, if I’m asking other people to chime in, maybe there should be some kind of collection of those essays. And I have like 80 ISBNs burning a hole in my pocket.
So I’m curious – if there were an anthology about the experiences of creative people, specifically focused on how their medication interacted with their creativity, would that be of interest? Are there people out there who would want to submit works – essays, poems, fiction, art – for such a book, and are there people who’d want to read it? All of this on the understanding that as with all Extribulum Press books, a free PDF version would be available alongside paid ePub and paper copies. Creators would be paid – I feel pretty strongly about paying people who submit work for sale publication – though I’m not sure how the fee structure would shake out and I’m not experienced in the legal side in terms of contracts and such. We could probably set up a smallish upfront flat payment and a percentage of royalties after the flat payments are recouped, with rights retained to the author for republication. If that’s of interest to you as an artist or reader, drop a comment or reblog (please don’t send asks, that’s a traffic jam waiting to happen).
And I do want to say, regardless of all else: if your medication does not allow you to be creative, or to enjoy your creativity, then that’s a problem, not just a side-effect. Get on whatever you can that will help you get your life together or get onto an even keel, but once that’s happened, loss of creativity is something you can and should address. It’s not a penalty you pay for sanity; if a medication made you lose the use of a hand, you’d want a different medication. Maybe it’s an unavoidable side effect, and if so that’s really a crap situation, but nobody should permanently accept the loss of creativity as a requisite without at least exploring all their options. Talk to your prescriber and ask about your options. We should all be nominally sane and wildly creative if we can.
Why the hell does [tumblr] app have a whopping 3.5gb of cache. What could it possibly be storing.
I’m in there. Hi. Please don’t clear it
Oops.
⠀
Guys, we did it! We survived February!
Uh. But just in case you need it.
I was playing Scattergories a few weeks ago, which is a game where you’re given a letter and a category and you have to come up with a word for the category that starts with the letter. Like “mode of transportation” and the letter V might lead you to put down “Vespa”. Or if you’re me you might think “votorcycle”, laugh to yourself, and then fail to come up with anything.
The key is that after time is up, everyone shares what word they wrote down and you only get a point if nobody else came up with the same word. You not only need to think of a unique word but know your fellow players well enough to dodge the words you think they would say.
So we had the letter D and one of the categories was Cartoon Character, and all of us put Donald Duck. As soon as we shared this, I said I’d considered and discarded Daffy Duck, and someone else said they did the same with Darkwing Duck. We got to talking about how there are so many other characters – Droopy Dog, Dot Warner, Denver the last dinosaur, Dexter (of the Lab) – but all of us got stuck on cartoon ducks. I said, “we got caught in a duck loop!” and wrote “the duck loop” at the top of my sheet.
It kinda stuck with me in part because of Rubber Duck Theory (see below) and I started using it as shorthand for getting stuck on an idea. Like rumination, but more neutral and more suited for small things. To become stuck in a duck loop is to get a single idea in your head that doesn’t make room for anything else even though you know other options are available if you could just think of them. It’s not being stubborn or falling for sunk cost fallacy, it’s just being unable to move past an idea you know isn’t good. For example, you know there are other ways to solve a problem but you can’t think of them because one method, even a bad one, has just gotten lodged in your consciousness.
And of course a good way to get out of a duck loop is to employ Rubber Duck Theory, a technique that came from early computer coding. If you can’t figure out why something isn’t working – initially, why code is buggy or if you can’t work out how to code something – you sit down and explain it to an inanimate object, usually a rubber bath duck procured for the purpose. The act of talking it out helps you realize where the issues are. And it’s a good way to escape the duck loop.
In any case, it’s been useful for me these past few weeks, so I figured I’d share. When you get in a duck loop, try some rubber duck theory to get you out again.
[Description: A gif of Polk, jumping up from the hallway rug where she was playing with tail high in the air, to come greet the camera. I was trying to film her playing with the ball but she caught me.]
