Today I awoke to a dreary overcast day, perfect of the universe to give me an overcast day on the only day in a few months that I've even had to go photographhin', but we work with what we're given. The journey is the destination and all that.

So here are some buildings and the scenery in the main part of West End in Winston Salem, NC. Not a terrible ton of fodder out there, but enough to fill the till for the day and get me out and about for a while.

After this I went and had some dipping tacos at a legit Mexican place and got mom a taco salad to take back home with me. I didn't feel much like stopping too many places.

The workflow has evolved. I now have neat little imagemagick scripts. How quaint! After I edit with #rawtherapee, I run my scripts to downsample my images to the size I like at the quality I like for my server.

As-is, my photos tend to overexpose, but I can always wrench them back on the editor. The camera says my brightness is perfect, but it always looks too washed out to me on the editor. I would trust the .jpeg files from the camera as-is if this wasn't the case, though I did do some cropping on two of these.

#photography #landscapephotography #mountain #pilotmountain #MtAiry #landscapephotography #canon #mirrorless #bofipho #r8 #cameras #northcarolina #nc #winstonsalem #blueways #greenways #cityscapes #landscapes #yourcity

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A rickety old bridge I found in the dark and dismal park. See? Dark and dismal can be okay too. Not everything needs sunshine.

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While we're being dreary, we might as well look at some roots of the creek that runs through here.

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stickers all over an electric meter, from whom to whom who can say.

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A Blue/Brown contrast I really liked that I was playing with, there's another set of buildings that look similar to this one, like they traded paint... but the other building is one street away.

One of my first ever big expeditions with a Camera was, against all good reason, was to climb the 3-4 miles to the top of Pilot Mountain - after working 10 hours that day.

Thursday, I had it in mind to come back to the mountain with fresh eyes and some experience.

Well... ehhh, I also didn't plan the timing of the day very well, as, as you can see, I don't have an actual photo of the mountain.

"Firekeeper, why do you not have pretty picture of Mountain?"

BECAUSE THE SUN WAS BEHIND IT!

Ughh, Charlie Brown. Well, I suppose my next visit to this splendiferous Mountain will be had at 7:00pm rather than 7:00am next round, but nonetheless, I did walk the top and grab shots as I went, and made the most of the morning mist down below, or as much as I could of it.

I took WAY more photos than I thought I did Thursday so these first four will be the first of eight to twelve from that trip. Right now, 8 seems more definite, so here's the first 4 that I've edited thus far.

tagdump:
#photography #landscapephotography #mountain #pilotmountain #MtAiry #landscapephotography #canon #mirrorless #bofipho #r8 #cameras #northcarolina #nc #winstonsalem #blueways #greenways

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View of some morning mist down below Pilot Mountain

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More Morning Mist, I wonder had I gotten here earlier if I had seen more... I wonder if I had gotten here earlier if I would be able to see anything lol

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Some ominous looking steps up to the crown of the mountain.

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Some craggulous rockyness up on the bald top of the mountain.

This is a very manecured place. It's part golf course to keep the Tesla and Corvette drivers busy and off of the highways during the day, but if you walk out far enough, you can still find some rustic rather untouched wilderness, my kinda stuff.

I did end up walking out of the woods and finding Mallard lake right in front of me and beyond it, part of the golf course itself, but it was a pleasant surprise to walk out of the woods after half a mile of walking and "BEHOLD... LAKE".

Oh yeah and happy first post on the new instance. Holla back y'all, my ego needs it.

#photography #wildlifephotography #naturephotography #landscapephotography #canon #mirrorless #bofipho #r8 #cameras #northcarolina #nc #winstonsalem #highpoint #greensboro #tanglewood #trees #flowers #plants #blueways #greenways #summer #forestphotography #forest #thewoods

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Some of the gardens around the Arboretum. Most of the flowers have come and gone... gotta be faster about these things, still mighty green tho.

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Another garden area, like this one a lot.

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Playing with reflections never gets old, Mallard Lake and the golf course beyond it.

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A spiderweb illuminated by a ray of sunlight

One beef, the lower bar stays on the screen on my phone in Firefox-based browsers and doesn't allow me to click past it to hit fullscreen. Aside from that, it's impressive that it does what it does already.

Anyway, here's the source:
https://github.com/rommapp/romm?tab=readme-ov-file#folder-structure

There's also clients and a budding community adding things constantly. Keep it in your sights.

#roms #emulation #classicgaming #retrogames #selfhosted #webapps

We just broke dystopian science fiction. You can't write something this insane and terrible.

https://x.com/Mp3onWavs/status/2082435253436555396

#uspol #usnews #warstate #news

Thank your #GOP congresscritters and senators for this

Burn. Every. Last. One. Of. Them. To. The. Ground. #superscalars #ruination #hypercapitalism #fuck

People can still have their tools, someone will reproduce them [and understand that if they fuck up and get greedy they also burn], but these villains are ruining the world.

“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

AI Firms Are Buying up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them
https://novaramedia.com/2026/07/29/ai-firms-are-buying-up-old-books-then-scanning-and-destroying-them/

Y'all! A friend from St. Louis just sent me this picture of her new kitten asleep in one of my bowls! 🥰

#Catsofmastodon #Pottery

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A close-up shot shows a fluffy white and light gray colorpoint kitten sleeping soundly inside a handmade ceramic bowl with a dark blue and brown drip glaze. The kitten is curled up in a ball, resting its head on the bowl's rim, and its eyes are closed. The background is a soft-focus interior, and the bowl is on a plain surface. The lighting is soft and warm.

Record outbreak of a diarrhea-causing parasite

20 million eggs recalled due to salmonella

Worst air quality in the world from wildfire smoke

UN says world risks HIV resurgence due to funding cuts

Most measles cases in 35 years, and it’s only July

They’re going after Dr. Fauci again to distract you from current public health failures

Normally where I'd be taking off every weekend to peruse nature, I've been kicking it with some family lately, and having my pipe on my back porch instead of a log somewhere, but come fall, I will descend upon the changing leaves, and try to find you guys some cool NC mushrooms.

For now, I will be a bit more vocal about news and things online. Rest assured the fire continues.

#nc #northcarolina #self #selfcare #summer #cameras #nature #climatechange

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Ah, sweet summer rain...

"In light of the dev silently blacklisting blahaj.zone, many of its users and several other instances, we have removed tesseract from the available lemmy front ends we offer."
https://sh.itjust.works/post/63861930

Agreed, if people don't want to see certain content, it should be blocked by their account, as their choice. No authoritarian bullshit, please. It's why many of us are here.

#tesseract #lemmy #piefed #mastodon #blahaj #db0

Check your instances and blocklists, y'all.

#mastodon #lemmy #tesseract #selfhosting #authoritarianism #lemmy #piefed

Would the Fediverse survive mastodon.social going permanently offline?

#EvanPoll #poll #MastodonSocial

Well, I took about 120 photos over the last three days, and not one of them is on this SD card.

The last photo per this SD card, was the last photo shown taken on Pilot Mountain.

...Why aren't they? I have no idea. It makes zero sense. I took photo after photo, reviewed them, took video, reviewed it. I'm livid, and beyond pissed because I was going to lay into you guys with new content and now, nothing, I guess?! They were fucking there 3 hours ago. They were there 6 hours ago. They were there yesterday! Did my Desktop do this? Did my laptop do this? Is this corruption? I have no idea.

I'm just gonna go for a while.

I'll be back maybe idk,...

Right now just... fuck everything and make it a double. What a waste of time, energy and effort.

edit: Disconnecting for a while, ciao. No internet, no nothing. I need it, peace.

New high end cocktail: The Reflecting Pool.
1- line your glass with a blue fruit roll up.
Then you're going to need:
2 oz rum
4 oz juice that is kinda yellow (pineapple, mango, orange, lemonade, whatever you like)
1 oz blue curacao (you can adjust for color)
Garnish with lime zest
The yellow and blue liquids make a lovely shade of algae and the rum eventually melts the blue fruit roll up, which is, IMHO, the best part.
Enjoy!

and yeah #pipetobacco people, I got the small batch at a local shop! Who knew living one state away from Cornell and Dehl would be a good thing?

And yeah it does have a... Sunny D note lmao.

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Gear shot with what's with me today.

Man, I am impatient to go photo grabbin, but it's not supposed to rain today, so I'll take my gear to Salem Lake instead!

There's this great finality that we've crossed a threshold in which we can't be as evil to eachother as we have been ever again. That was us, it isn't us now, and we'd never let any of that happen again. Racism was wrong, slavery was wrong, segregation was wrong, nonequal voting rights and social standards were wrong. We even took a great leap and decided the Nazis were wrong, collectively. Harassment of the LGBTQ+ community and differences between person to person are often treated like old issues. We'd moved past all that. That was the 'old US'.

"As I etch this final tome, I harken back..."

Man, I hope nothing happens to ruin these authors' bright outlooks on the future of humanity in oh... five years.

"We keep putting Epstein class shills in charge and they keep paving the road to fascism. What gives?"

July 4th
Kernersville July 4th Parade (and such)
512 W Mountain St
Kernersville
8:30-11

When it's too hot to trot alone, one must find ample shade, water and company!

It continues where it began.
Let's go #photograph the people.

"Ali G"

My dad was a good person, so much so, that he's the bar I use for other southerners. I knew him up and down, his motivations and what he really believed. It took a few years to get there but he laid it all bare if you gave him enough time to tell his stories and see the cracks in the red-white-and-blue paint.

My dad was born in 1938, a son to a blue collar worker too old for the draft, but still close enough to WWII for the reveling and the patriotism. Dad was seasoned with the goings-on in the 50's and 60's, events and hype. He drove his Dodge and Chevies, watched Eastwood films, jammed to Johnny, Waylon, Willie and the boys, and smoked a pack a day until he was 60-something. He even had a stint as a cop for a few months until it got to his conscience.

Dad was not "that guy". Dad repeated phrases and sayings of other men to fit in, but like anyone else in the South, It's what you do, not what you say. Even having said that, I have a hard time even finding an n-word from the man in my mental record in the 28 years I knew him.

He'd say something to the effect of:

"Well, yeah, we... had a hand in some riots, but I wasn't there that long. I didn't like the work."

Why he didn't like the work, he wouldn't outwardly say in that moment, as his generation mainly kept those types of thoughts to themselves, and my dad would be the last person to paint a bad picture of the cops. No one would ever "say", or show weakness. It's just not in the Dude Bible of the 1960's. You had to catch the details in passing or bait it out some other way, but his way of telling stories all the time got the job done, and there was one other thing. There was one aspect of my dad that came with most people born in the late 30s. Dad. HATED. NAZIS.

Dad hated ze nazis so much that they dominated any other hate for anything else. Dad's hate for nazis even eclipsed his born-into hate for communists. Dad had a soft-spot for Russia -for fucking over the nazis! Dad hated nazis even when there was no call for hating anything, and the symbolism used. You couldn't have "any old cross" in the house. It had to be peer-reviewed (by him, naturally) to make sure Hitler didn't use it, which actually happened in relation to a necklace I had once.

Dad read a lot in his final days, a lot of political analysis books, usually stuff about global spy networks and shadow governments ran by oligarchs. I was too young to see who or what these influences were, good or bad, but in memory, dad wasn't too happy with the state of the world by the late 2000's.

"We are at the mercy of the super rich and super intelligent."

Dad's entire ethos was patriotism. But by then, he had pride in his country, but not his government. He had pride in a down-home southern farmer's market, but not Bush or Obama. There was a love in him, but a hurt in him, a feeling that he was physically and mentally out of time with the world. It had been better, it had been right and just and now was not, although I believe proof to the contrary had hit him by then.

Dad never gave anything the benefit of the doubt but God, and nobody and nothing else got the pleasure of having it. If you said something fucked up and insensitive to him, he's slap the snot out of you. If you said it with God or America's blessing and quoted some congressional dribble, you'd get "the look". (aka: "Smartass...")

By and large, my dad is my great example of how upbringing, peer pressure, time and place can't hide or ruin who a person is at their core. Dad's conscience walked him away time and time again from the worst crimes you can commit against other men.

He had lowered every gun he'd ever aimed.

"You know, Jack really wants to shoot a deer. I've seen two or three already and it's only been a few hours since we put the salt out."

"why didn't you shoot one?"

"I... I don't want to take anything from Jack is all..."

#fathersday #dad

AI is the death of all human culture.

Source:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/06/16/did-ai-write-this-article
here's the no-paywall text... https://archive.ph/20260617035244/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/06/16/did-ai-write-this-article

#AI #Capitalism #Dystopia

. . .
#JD20260619 #JDLinkBlog
https://todon.eu/@jd/tagged/JD20260619

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Rohan Paul tweets: The Economist: AI has pushed the internet’s content machine into a new phase, with books, lawsuits, research papers, apps, and songs now being produced at volumes that old review systems were not built to handle. Amazon e-book releases rose from about 100,000 a month before ChatGPT-3.5 to roughly 300,000 by late 2025, and detection tools suggest AI-generated text drove much of that jump. US self-filed civil lawsuits doubled to 41,000 from 2023 to 2025, with 18% of sampled 2026 complaints flagged as AI-written, yet their success rate did not fall. Research is seeing the same pressure, as arXiv submissions keep rising, rejection rates have more than doubled since 2023, and one study found 57% of 2025 papers carried AI-influenced language, up from 12% in 2023. Coding agents have also changed software output, with new iOS App Store releases now above 100,000 a month after sitting below 50,000 last May. In Music production, 75,000 AI songs are arriving daily, up from 10,000, while 44% of new uploads are AI-made and 97% of listeners in one survey could not reliably tell the difference.

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Graphic: Al-generated books are on the rise Amazon, monthly e-book releases, '000

Conservatives have been banning and trying to ban shit "for the children" for as long as I've been alive. Hell, I'm one of those things they want to ban.

These #antimemetic beings walk next to us in every day life, feeding on taboo and sensitive topics in our culture and keeping them bound in mystique. Our confusion feeds their entire herd, and has fed them for generations, eons, since man first took cannabis to flame.

Allusion to these elephants, like anything else, is swept under the rug. They, like the topics they describe, do not exist in a conversational sense. They delete their own presence, but there's a lag. We see and note them, know they're there, but usually after it's too late. Was there ever an elephant? Of course not. That's just what the elephant wants you to believe, as it's another thought it stole from you, but you know you saw it, didn't you?

Whether these elephants collude in their collective confusion-making is unclear, or what their cosmic goal is beyond sustinence. Are they intelligent, or do they pick topics based on our perceived personal shame or discovery?

Needless to say, this is all for not, as like any other written form of media, the elephants know this message has been posted. An elephant near you knows that the second you read this, he must spring into action and devour this discovery to protect his species' survival.

Who's post did you even boost? "Didn't I read something 20 minutes ago?"

Anyway, I'd say "be wary" a few more times, but soon you'll realize there's nothing there at all.

...What were we talking about?

Has anybody heard of “A.I."?

One of my first ever big expeditions with a Camera was, against all good reason, was to climb the 3-4 miles to the top of Pilot Mountain - after working 10 hours that day.

Thursday, I had it in mind to come back to the mountain with fresh eyes and some experience.

Well... ehhh, I also didn't plan the timing of the day very well, as, as you can see, I don't have an actual photo of the mountain.

"Firekeeper, why do you not have pretty picture of Mountain?"

BECAUSE THE SUN WAS BEHIND IT!

Ughh, Charlie Brown. Well, I suppose my next visit to this splendiferous Mountain will be had at 7:00pm rather than 7:00am next round, but nonetheless, I did walk the top and grab shots as I went, and made the most of the morning mist down below, or as much as I could of it.

I took WAY more photos than I thought I did Thursday so these first four will be the first of eight to twelve from that trip. Right now, 8 seems more definite, so here's the first 4 that I've edited thus far.

tagdump:
#photography #landscapephotography #mountain #pilotmountain #MtAiry #landscapephotography #canon #mirrorless #bofipho #r8 #cameras #northcarolina #nc #winstonsalem #blueways #greenways

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View of some morning mist down below Pilot Mountain

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More Morning Mist, I wonder had I gotten here earlier if I had seen more... I wonder if I had gotten here earlier if I would be able to see anything lol

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Some ominous looking steps up to the crown of the mountain.

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Some craggulous rockyness up on the bald top of the mountain.

my lungs feel great.

A contact online led me to some of Mark Twain's writings on religion. Knowing he was also a southerner who was raised on similar teachings to me - and... kinda knowing how he turned out in the end had me interested.

For those who don't know, Samuel Clemens was a deeply conflicted person in regards to religion, and it makes sense considering his upbringing and childhood culture. Even in his most heated, hateful, searing, atheistic writings you feel... a pain, a hurt, a feeling like he had been duped and is lashing out years of lies and liars, and in some sense you even get the idea that despite feeling the afterlife is all a lie, and an antiquated puzzle for fools, that he really wishes it wasn't so.

That claw sticks with you, as a nonreligious southerner. It's true. You remember, and you know that 'feeling'. You did want it to be true. You did want to believe it, to fit in, that the good word wasn't supplemented with dark words you passed over until you believed otherwise, back when huge, galactic spans of time were issued in seven day spans. The cult always looks so nice from the outside and you really don't want to admit or give credit to any of the cracks in the paint to the contrary when you're still sipping from the town kool-aid fountain along with everyone else.

Everyone you know is saying it's true, and everyone you know - as far as you know is 100% telling their heart's honest truth. Despite all this, you love and respect them as your community as they respect you into theirs.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to look one of them in the eye and say no, and watch the veil fall a little on them, then see the grip of their belief tighten against that instant of doubt, in the moment as it happens, as they choose their resolve... over you, their brother? I've seen it happen in front of me, over and over again. Sam comes off to me as someone who has seen this himself, as someone who has also been hurt by it and has felt separated from his kin by it. It does alienate you. You ask yourself over and over why they can't see and why you can, endlessly tossing it in your head like a marble with no target. It's usually at this point that an atheist goes two different ways, in my experience. They either make monsters of the religious, or realize that the true sadness is that the religious are asking them the exact same question you're asking. "Why can't you just see? Why can they?"

The funny thing is, after all these years and after reading "Letters from the Earth", and being steeped in philosophy, I get it, man. Sometimes,... you really do wish, despite everything else, despite the truth, the elephants in every room, the endless connections to political dramas, wars, corruption, and all of the lies. Despite all that, you still remember that bored kid you were in Sunday School, taking anyone's word and a smile for truth as genuine as being told a red crayon isn't blue or the green grass isn't yellow.

Packing one for you, Sam.

A long time ago, I was heavily involved in the Vape industry right out of the gate, made a lot of mistakes trusting a lot of the wrong people, and after it was all said-and-done, I was plopped right back into blue-collar slave-wagery with the only quarter given being the experience had.

For about four exciting years of my life, we were on an industry high that felt like a whirlwind of fortune and dreams. It was my young inexperience that expected the updrafting gust given by CEOs and investors to last forever, and our jobs whittled down more and more, until the Vape industry cuddled into gas stations and convenience stores, overseen by the same industry giants that we - at one time laughed at behind doors we thought would stand forever. I'm happy, all things considered. I pay my own way, as a mechanic, these days. It took a while to realize that my real treasure is experience. I don't make as much as most, but I can work anywhere and do nearly anything considering the shit I've been through over the years.

Aside from that, I've been at least some color blue since I was in High School. I've never leaned right, and the Iraq war was my introduction into the American art of creating your own wars for profit. Recently that shade went more solid blue than liberal, I consider both sides two halves of the same coin, even if 5 or 6 paid Democrats actually do say what everyone's thinking, the rest get their salaries earned through enabling the things we post memes about on places like this.

I've been on the internet since Independence Day came out, I had a floppy game lol, that came in a cereal box. I've been crawling and bouncing UBB boards for years, then Reddit, then Lemmy, then here.

Anyway, we get a lot of time to look at pretty photos, boost and boost and favorite ourselves to death, I figured if we're going to go out soon, you might as well get a little bit more out of me than just another photo of a tree before the curtain rolls in.

I'm hoping I'm wrong, and I'm wishing to anyone's deity - if listening, as a great opportunity for a chance at potential spiritual conversion if they take the job of reversing our course.

Until then, I'm gonna go take a photo of a mountain in three hours. Seeya there.

-W

#Meme #Humour

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A meme photo showing a man with short stature wearing a blue t-shirt, jeans, work boots, and a baseball cap, standing with his hands in his pockets on a grassy field. In the background is a large red barn-like structure with various automotive parts and people scattered around. White text overlaid across the middle reads "How I imagine my dad as a kid".

Howdy folks, as some of y'all are aware, I carry an Android phone - specifically a Oneplus 11 on Lineage.

This whole 'Android dev lockdown / verification' situation irks me. I don't like the play store, I see it as a den of malware and villainy, only meant to peddle corporate spyware, invasive Ai agents, tracking systems and ads into our lives.

So I am faced with a dilemma, but as a millennial, I remember Y2K. The world didn't end just because it suddenly went from 1999 to 2000, and so the world won't end just because September is coming, then August, and so forth.

There will be holdouts, there will be devs who 'dgaf', who continue putting out apks for 'unverified' Android. Hell, you'll likely have two years of boredom and tossing it about in your mind before you actually have to do anything about it to function in society.

So, where do I sit? I'm in the holdout camp in the short term. I have a plan for the bigger picture that will basically treat a post-2026 cellphone like a piece of radioactive material that's only purpose is to beam a tetherable wifi connection, and only be used for calls and ordering pizza whenever it's rarely let out of its Faraday bag or vaccum-sealed lead box.

Thanks to Google, Apple and Microslop, We live in a caustic world that hates and despises us, but that's all well and good.

So do they.

#cellphones #android #google #unverified #verification

After the storm
And before the next
#clouds #photography

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A dramatic sky filled with fluffy, textured clouds, illuminated by sunlight, with dark silhouettes of trees at the bottom.

Ideally, I want a ~50mm pancake equivalent for this to match my R8. Something in the 24-35mm range should do for APS-C. I'm not that picky, but for now, the stock lens will do fine, and it closes up rather tiny even if it is a zoom lens. All good!

#photography #cameras #sony

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A new(used) camera!? What could it be?!

I have my DuckDuckGo search set to no AI and also to hide AI images, but a lot of AI images make it through regardless. The zone is just flooded with slop.

If adults can have 420 and 69 as their "funny" numbers, then the kids can have 67.

After which you need a new vase.

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A sign saying 5 Day Vase Life

Boots are the answer.

...Vegetarians tho

_throws chalkboard_ so much for that idea.