You commit one murder and the dating scene won’t let you live it down

The archetype of the Hot Tub Santa (paunchy, white-haired older guy who’s overly generous with his sexual affections) is and established thing.

if you can’t spell “cheburashka”

Because you’re an old. The half-remembered fixations of your long-passed adolescence were the forbidden fruit of alcohol, drugs, sex and R-rated movies. Your decrepit Xoomer mind is literally incapable of understanding cube.

“Would Madam care for the salmon?” — me to my cat

Perhaps the confounding factor is neurodiversity? Anecdotally, a lot more neurodiverse people seem to be LGBT and vice versa.

Masonry was the prototype for such movements. Historians have it emerging from stonemasons’ guilds accepting (and becoming fashionable to) aristocratic/bourgeois patrons in the 17th century, and then riding a number of historical waves (enlightenment-era coffee-house culture, the rise of nationalism in the romantic era in Europe, Napoleon, the British Empire, and so on). Others drew on it. The Bavarian Illuminati were probably the best known, but by no means only, esoteric secret society modelled on Masonry. In the other direction, Rotary was essentially Masonry without the woo. Various nationalist, royalist and sectarian secret societies (like the Carbonari in Italy and unionists in Northern Ireland) modelled themselves on Masonry, and Cuba is the only Communist country to not ban Freemasonry because a lot of the revolutionaries there were Masons. So yes, Freemasonry was more of a moment than a coherent thing.

Lon Milo Duquette the Thelemist occultist? I imagine he’d have incentives for taking maximalist interpretations, even if it involves taking leaps of faith. And doesn’t most of the “evidence” of the Illuminati existing beyond Weishaupt’s group come from hysterical anti-Masonic conspiracy theorists like Abbé Barruel (who blamed the horrors of the French Revolution on Masonry and Illuminism, which he conflated into a Satanic plot), and from other anti-Masonic conspiracy theorists who drew on his work?

Not that there weren’t groups claiming descent from the Illuminati, but along the same lines, for a long time you could join the Rosicrucians by sending a check to a PO box advertised in a magazine.

Their ranks for the 8 or so years they officially existed, or from claims that the Illuminati went underground and were involved in key moments in history? Are you conflating the Bavarian Illuminati with Freemasonry by any chance?

If it’s the actual Bavarian Illuminati, then they probably picked you as a credulous, deep-pocketed nobleman who can be pumped for membership dues in return for initiation to an endless ladder of degrees, each revealing profoundly esoteric secrets which don’t actually mean anything. If you’re one of a handful who show themselves to be sceptical and open-minded, perhaps Adam Weishaupt will take you aside and reveal that all that woo was just bullshit to part the rubes from their money, and the true mission of the Illuminati is to spread Enlightenment ideals, such as secularism and anti-monarchism, which the authorities take a very dim view of.

When’s the wedding?

Hustling hard to keep their heads above water, or collapsing in front of the TV exhausted. Maybe fantasising about sex or vacations or what they would do if they were rich. Possibly having an existential crisis.

Well, stay off Instagram and BlueSky then

That’s a cyrillic number plate from somewhere in the former USSR, right?

Bullet dodged

It’s great in a world of electrical appliances which need to be earthed for safety, but the mandatory earth pin and extra-chunky dimensions take up much more space than required for unearthed devices (such as most modern electronics). There should be a Europlug-style 2-pin variant.

The Swiss standard, which is basically Europlug with a staggered earth pin, seems a step up from Schuko. You can fit three of them in the space of one Schuko socket.

There’s a newer standard which is meant to be international, and which is like a slightly smaller version of the Swiss plug, but only Brazil has fully adopted it (IIRC, South Africa is in the process of moving to it)

That message looks cutesy and whimsical, but would be hard to understand for users with a limited command of English. Though given that it’s Hyprland, concern for the untermenschen is probably not to be expected

also, a furry

“Transported to a surreal landscape, a teenage girl kills a bystander and teams up with three strangers to kill again” – apparently a TV guide review