Catapostrophe.

It has been a nice (nearly) three week vacation¹ from you pestilent corpuscles, but now I have returned. I do hope you've enjoyed the respite you were granted, however brief, from the torturous, twisting words that my cognitive musings beget upon you, the reader.

While working on my most brilliant masterstroke to date, I've found that even with my incredibly advanced intellect and prescience of multiple plan outcomes, it's quite difficult to produce perfect grandiose schemes while under an external deadline for other projects. I'm definitely going to need to concentrate on that "pocket dimension time" project that I've procrastinated on for so long.

Projects are especially difficult to complete, however, when I'm often surrounded by imbeciles² and the public at large. Case in point: the way my entire being twists and rejects the notion of supposedly English-speaking people don't understand how to use apostrophes.

I was at the grocery store a short while ago, procuring provisions for this biologically needy form and found this abomination:

I'm not even going to go into the fact that the word is spelled "Entrée" as it is futile to complain that the menial laborer of average intelligence³ doesn't know a foreign word⁴; I can, however, deride them being unable to comprehend the basic syntax structure of their natural language that they grew up with and ostensibly went to school to learn⁵. Obviously, this sign should have been constructed without that poor, sad apostrophe. Look at it... Look at it... forced to stand curved-bit deep in its own humiliation, an enduring reminder that it simply should not be⁶ and proof that the collective intelligence of the average grocery store worker is still ever-so steadily declining; the mechanically lurching down escalator in a grey-matter rendering plant.

Even more sadly, this is in a more upscale store; that section itself recently remodeled. You'd think that they'd have someone in the advertising and signs department capable of proper language structure. After all, these are people who are hired specifically for their communication skills.

If one is going to summarily turn the proverbial pooch of one's language into one's prison bitch, as it were, one should at least be consistent. A few days later, I ran into the following in a store selling the goods of the Galactic Empire⁷:

Yes. That is a photo recording of three separate spellings of "boys" (with plural, possessive, and group possessive represented), all within visual distance of one another. Considering the common clientele of said warehouse of despair, I'd be surprised if they could glance up from their passel of genetic cast-offs long enough to notice.

I'm accelerating the plans to re-construct my doomsday device. Not a single one of these imbeciles deserve to continue polluting this planet.

1. A working vacation, yes... but as they say, make your vocation into your vacation! That's why "all the screaming", as it were.

2. The immediate circle at my "menial day job" is largely imbecile-free, thankfully. It's when that circle expands that they start slipping in, banana slugs to my creative energy's soft, succulent salad leaves.
3. Evidently, towards the lower side of that average...
4. Or an ASCII code and how to use one.
5. I might be willing to grant someone uneducated more leniency, but probably not. A completely uneducated bag of meat wouldn't be copywriting signs in a grocery store, they would be out filling their boots with gravel, or driving UPS trucks, or cooking digestible protein at one of your "fast food" joints, or going to tea party rallies, or standing around in the rain with their mouths open and drowning... whatever it is that uneducated people do for fun for their short, meaningless existences these days. I miss natural selection.
6. If you listen close, you can hear its quiet squeaking: "Kill meeeee..."
7. Logos do not lie. Observe.

And now, for a taste of things to come... *gong*

Well, last week turned into nearly an entire week of relaxation, without having to worry about deadlines¹ or laboratory mishaps². Don't you worry though, little reader, for I have something BIG planned soon, oh yes I do! You'll just have to wait and see...


Also, a quick report about the tents selling TNT. There was no trinitrotoluene to be purchased from the purveyors of the establishment, nor were there any blocks of C4, vials of nitroglycerin, miscellaneous rockets, plutonium-239, or any other explosive devices or compounds: mere pittances of colored gunpowder stuffed into little paper tubes, designed to light up and pop loudly when the detonator cord was lit. Nothing more than what the average four year old in my former island nation carried when leaving whatever passed for their domicile³ to scare away predators⁴, or used as playthings by infants.

I was disappointed.

However, aside from one of the hounds fearing the loud, sudden noises the explosions on the night of the 4^th were ... amusing.

More to come soon, mortal weaklings.

1. Definitely a change of pace -- I had nothing (and nobody) to ransom, so there was no time to expire and no evil obligations because of it.
2. I was rather upset at the abject failure of several minions, however.
3. ...for their shift in the coal mines.
4. This often did not work. Most of the predators were either top-of-the-food-chain, genetically-altered beasts or cyborgs that carried larger weapons themselves. The only things these devices would reliably scare away were the crazed hobo population, which became evermore curious to me for their resilience in the face of said predators in the latter days of my evil empire.

Ranter's Lament

Yesterday I wanted to relax a bit for my evening, and a bit turned into a lot. Later, I didn't feel like digitally archiving my thoughts, so you wretches get another special Tuesday bonus edition of Overlord in Exile¹ just like last week. Aren't you lucky. Don't come to expect it though.

I've been finding my undercover status... inconvenient, lately. My isolated fortress allowed me to avoid contact with the rabble, no matter how much they beat at the portcullis with pitchforks and torches². Unfortunately, with my current situation, I'm forced to do things such as "shopping" and "picking stuff up on my way home from drudgery." This leads to myself, omnipotent humble genius³, being thrust into close quarters with the great unwashed masses⁴. This inevitably results in chains of human detritus, sometimes attached by harnesses and sometimes free-floating, clustered around a shopping cart, blocking my path and generally making nuisances of themselves. They are often reminiscent of the cloudy stringers descending from the mother in a jar of vinegar, or the twisted mass of a jellyfish's tentacles, stinging and feeding upon the unwary.

While infuriating, this is not even the most bothersome part. Biological life is messy and, in truth, often causing inconvenient obstructions⁵. It tends to multiply uncontrollably, more so the less intelligent it is. While palpable, it is akin to despising the motion of the tides⁶. No, the inspiration for a loathing with the seething intensity of an Ebola outbreak in Manhattan is the inability of the (often massive) nucleus of such a cluster to fail to notice either the vile behavior of its spawn or the fact that I am... very patiently... waiting and trying to pass while it vacantly stares at the shelf, attempting to decide whether to purchase chocolate frosted sugar bombs for its hyperactive lineage or to go with the generic variety, saving a good portion of its annual income in the process. I know that I am in its peripheral vision, and that my cloaking generator is not on my persona⁷.

Normally, I would simply excite the chemical bonds of every atom in each of their impudent flesh until they burst into flame, or pull out a hyperneutrino phase-wave collapser and cause them to dissolve like a sugar cube in tea, or fold a U.S. one hundred dollar bill, fold it into the shape of an atmospheric dart assault craft and throw it into freeway traffic while they watched and let natural selection take its course. However, all of these admittedly tantalizing options would draw far too much attention to my presence and power, revealing me to my enemies.

So I stand there... staring... resisting the urge to open my mouth for fear of the obscenities that would pour forth, coating them in a sludge so viscous that they could not breathe; my hand twitches, resisting the impulse to lift their fully loaded cart over my head and bring it down upon them as a club, crushing them beneath it as flat as the final stage in the life cycle of a common opossum.

No, no... I wait, and commit each line and every fold of the foul creature's upper protrusion that can only be tangentially called a face to memory, assigning it a priority that rises the longer I wait, and plot my revenge.

For now, I am off... there are curious... "tents" that have popped up at various locations all over town, advertising the free and open sale of rockets and trinitrotoluene by the barrelful. Evidently they take all manner of credit, as well. This merits investigation.


1. Now with 10% more snarkiness!
2. This stopped once I installed the automatic drawbridge. Amusingly, it had enough torque and tensile strength to actually catapault people on it when I'd shut it fast enough. Glee!
3. ...and Champion Supreme of footnotes!
4. And indeed, depending on the store, "unwashed" only begins to describe the stench.
5. The piled corpses of my slain enemies, for instance, can sometimes make it difficult for my chariot to pass. They also used to fill up the moat before I switched to the magma-filled model, solving the problem with the price of leaving a faint ashy residue about.
6. ...which can be changed, but you need a graviton mass displacement generator, appropriate feedstock (napkin-math says about 700 rabbits or 40 orphans will do) and about 4600 GW of electricity. Preferably provided by solar sources; I must think about my planet's overall health these days.
7. Having left it in the lab of my island fortress during the insurrection, and not having enough tellurium to build another... yet.