The day started off terrible and got worse.

She woke up with a laggy feeling, as though some invisible weight was pulling her down. When she ate food, it left her with a vaguely nauseated feeling that didn’t get better as the day progressed.

Am I getting sick? she wondered. Not realizing that it wasn’t that she was coming down with an illness but that some part of the universe was trying to warn her.

She filled the washing machine and started the water running as she measured out the detergent and poured it in, wondering that the usually translucent white detergent was cloudy and maybe a bit thick. She just thought that it might be a new brand until the last bit dripped out of the cup and her eyes focused on the bottle where it said "Fabric softener."

"Oh no," she muttered, staring into the machine.

The fabric softener was already in there, there was nothing she could do about that. She sighed. She would have to let the machine finish running then wash the clothes again with actual laundry detergent.

She wondered where the fabric softener had come from. Finally decided that it was probably a mistake the last time they ordered groceries. It was nearly the same label as the laundry detergent they usually got.

She closed the washing machine lid and went to wash her hands. It looked like it was going to be twice as long as she’d planned for the laundry to be done.

Heading into the kitchen to make some lunch, she turned on the TV in passing. It was a surprise to find that rather than her usual show it was some kind of news program playing, a bright red "BREAKING NEWS!" ribbon covering the top of the screen.

She walked close to the TV, staring in horrified fascination.

Fires. Screams. The urgent tone of the reporters’ voices. Everything blended together into a sense of unreality.

Santa’s sleigh had fallen off the top of the Hinckle building during the Happy Holidays Parade, and it turned out that it had been built more solidly than anyone could have expected.

A ten-meter long heavy metal frame attached by thick ropes decorated to look like reins to nine cast iron reindeer with sharp yet brittle metal antlers dropped from a height of more than 152 meters onto a crowd of people.

It was a bloodbath.

She stared in shock, her hands hanging limp at her sides.

Her family had gone to the parade. She had planned to go too, but the discomfort in her stomach had made her decide to stay home. They had promised to bring her back some parade candy.

The nauseated feeling grew until it enveloped her whole body. Then she dropped to the floor, unconscious.

The day had started off bad and had become nightmare levels of terrible. And like the fabric softener that had already gone into the washing machine, once it had happened it could not be undone. No matter how much she wished things could be different.

=END=

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.

I accidentally added fabric softener to the washing machine instead of detergent. I don’t even know where the fabric softener came from, only the label looks exactly like the All Free and Clear we usually get except it has a little "Fabric Softener" on the label that the grocery shopper probably didn’t even notice.

There’s a reason I believe all liquid fabric softeners should come in blue or pink jugs. You should be able to differentiate it from laundry soap without having to read the whole label.

Uramichi Oniisan 01 at Amazon

Merry Christmas if you celebrate. Happy Holidays for everyone! May the next year be filled with happiness and joy and all the good things your heart desires.

Seriously dudes: Don’t let those blackhearted monsters get a hold of your soul. We spread commonsense, decency, kindness, helpful information for our neighbors and our communities and our country at large and for our global neighbors who also wish us well so we can have a planet populated by a humanity that isn’t killing itself and every other living thing on it, and philosophy.

I think it’s a little terrifying that some people don’t ever consider things deeper than "Explosion big! Motorcycle crash! Why girl constantly criticizing hardworking dad?" Especially when it turns out to be "Dad is a dangerous guy doing dangerous things that adversely effect the people around him. In the real world, his sort does all that goofy shit while in other countries. Meanwhile, because this show is set locally and involves his family, we are aware that the things he does are by all definitions bad. Bad for him. Bad for his family. Bad for his community. Bad for the country. Bad for the world. Bad."

We love Roger. Roger is fun entertainment. Roger is being protected by a government official with a propensity for breaking laws. But what if Roger wasn’t an alien from space but like that guy that pretended to be all different kinds of people and scammed all those places?

He pretended to be an airplane pilot!

His actor made him seem like he would give some excuse and talk his way out of actually having to fly a jet full of people. But the real guy the movie is based on?!?

American television and movies show that we are leaning hard into secularism(?). Is that the word? Whatever it is that has people grab their kid and push and shove their way through a crowd of people. Just violently shoving people out of the way, singularly focused on saving themself and/or their child.

It’s why Boy Moms scare me.

Because if that’s not all fake shit done for clicks… It’s still indoctrination. It is still a propaganda, or mind control, or Conditioning ala C.J. Cherryh.

For reals: In the book with all the giant bugs and the battles between billionaires, one of the azi is turned into a citizen by running a single long tape. He takes the mind-opening medication, his master straps him into the chair, and she orders him to watch that tape and she leaves the room. And that tape is some programming to break the Conditioning they use to control the azi. (And after that, he is no longer destined to die at 40 years old like the other azi. He is a Citizen now.)

And the point of the azi reference is that the tape is not for Conditioning, it’s for breaking conditioning.

It’s like, you have to go through hours of tape, and the purpose is to counteract all the beliefs and bullshit that were previously taught to you over the course of your whole life. From the time you were a baby!

And I guess it’s like when they do cult deprogramming.

Like, for a while there the news was full of all kinds of stories of parents rescuing their teenaged children from music sex cults. And they would hire dudes to go in and get their children back for them.

It all got a bit overshadowed when other parents started sending their children to weird sex cult summer camps. Like, they were letting their teenaged children be manhandled by sadistic counselors who would sexually assault them to change their sexuality. PARENTS PAID MONEY TO DO THAT TO THEIR CHILDREN. Our attentions immediately shifted to focus on all that.

So if the "rescuing teenagers from cults"-thing kind of fell off, I’m sorry for that. Or maybe they were forced to form an FBI department that has since been defunded and reassigned for some mysterious reason. Maybe we didn’t have as much weird cult stuff because the government was preventing what they could.

Like, parents can take their children pretty much anywhere they want. If the parents join a cult, nobody can stop them from forcing their children to join the cult. Which is why there were so many weird MLM-situations happening out there. But if a child joins a cult, their parents can take them away from that.

It’s just that the biggest cults around are whole family experiences. People choosing to destroy their own communities and the planet to show their obedience to an antichrist.

"It’s THE Antichrist. Get it right!"–Nah, brah, it’s "an" antichrist. As in there isn’t only one and more can pop up at any time. It’s why you’re supposed to beware of false prophets (and false profits).

Anyone telling you what the afterlife is going to be like is a liar.

We are frogs in the bottom of a well. Our view is like the one from inside the well in "The Ring" before the mom closes the lid on it. We either see a perfect circular view of a near empty sky, or we see an obstructed view of a near empty sky and part of the bottom of the cover that can suffocate us at any moment.

We do not know what happens after we leave this mortal coil.

There are plenty of people donning the guise of Christianity while firmly believing there will be no consequences for their actions. They tempt with money, with clout, or they force with threats and aggression. They’re basically the Bishops and Cardinals from the "Dante’s Inferno" videogame.

"If you attack and kill these people, you will not go to Hell because you’re doing it for the Church!" And then the guy goes to Hell and while he’s slogging his way through to rescue Beatrice, he sees all those religious leaders being tormented and punished because they were wrong.

Some guy telling you to do big time evil stuff–"Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a connection to Heaven"–with the promise that there will never be any consequences for your crimes is not to be trusted. He seems like an instigator out to ruin your life.

And there’s kids out there RIGHT NOW being raised–homeschooled!–by people that don’t believe the Earth is round.

There are a lot of people that are going to need trustworthy sources of information in the not-too-far off future.

So 2026 is a good year to become a beacon of hope. To be a source of commonsense TRUE information and not a bunch of grifter trickery and lies. It is a good year to be a better person because the world is going to shit and everyone should do their part to stop the destruction of civilization.

Society can change. Can become better for humanity and the environment and all the other creatures we share this planet with. The complete destruction of modern civilization is not necessary for the betterment of anything.

I’m making a wish that 2026 be a better year. And that every year afterward will get better and better and better. For all of us.

Happy holidays. Happy Festivus to the rest of us. Enjoy a glorious New Year.

My 2025 "12 Days of Xmas" attempt will be commencing sometime later today. Wish me luck. If you’ve got any themes or genres you would like, now is the time to ask, because I’ve got 12 days of stories to write and I don’t think up story ideas for the 12 Days until I start writing.

I leave all that to later-me. And hopefully that later-me will manage to write and post something that doesn’t suck. Fingers, as always, crossed.

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.

Count Zero at Amazon

We’re on the 3rd day of our advent calendar, and I think I’m posting about it earlier today than I did yesterday.

Advent Day 3: Some recipes and food-related stuff: https://www.patreon.com/posts/advent-day-3-145899541

Yes, the advent is happening on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/HarperKingsley) and I’m resharing it here.

Like 12 Days of Xmas, it’s free (to look at for entertainment purposes, not to be used for any kind of generative content or anything that involves scraping my content and loading it into a plagiarism machine for repurpose. The "transformative works" descriptor only applies for humans, not for machines they may use. Any bit of my content–past, present, or future–added to an LLM (or LLM-type programming code that fills the role of "AI" as currently described, including "algorithms" and all that that descriptor implies) comes with the creator copyright rules that any time the model containing my data is accessed the controller of the model or the owner of the server hosting the model will pay me $100. My content being added to their data servers is their agreement to pay me money and they will not contest in any way, and if they do they agree to pay me $1000 and another $500 per each day that they have hosted my content without my permission on their servers. If the content is loaded through users of their servers, the controller of any models using my content takes responsibility if the content becomes available through their servers to anyone other than the original uploader, as they should be ensuring they are not hosting and using copyrighted material without permission of the copyright holder. As such, anyone that uses my content to auto-generate any content for profit, clout, or view count agrees to pay me $200 every time that content generates $1000 or 10,000 views.) Enjoy!

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.

P.S. I am not a lawyer. The intent is clear.

It is with both humor and hope that the law would be on my side if I ever went against a clanker and their machines that I claim copyright to all my works. Because AI is worth a lot of money, and I would like to receive some of it via the least harmful means possible. Especially if my content is being exploited for the enrichment of other people.

I also think it’s funny to think of that burst of legalese popping out at high speed in the middle of an introductory conversation. Like, "Welcome to our company. I’m glad to meet you on your first day. My name is… and I work in… And if you touch or move or in any way interact with my mug I have the right and obligation to take one thing from your cubicle and that thing will then belong to me. You agree to this exchange of property of your own free will and do not have any legal recourse but to let me take something from your cubicle. You accept that every time you’re in proximity to my mug you are under video surveillance and I have the right to use those surveillance videos in any way that I deem to do so. And we have… departments in our company with… employees across four floors. We’re on the east side of the second floor and the working elevator is on the west side, so make sure to come in a bit earlier so you can clock in on time. The copy machines are all on the third floor, so you should probably keep a nice pair of shoes in your cubicle for when you have to take ‘The Walk’ to the copiers."

All Systems Red at Amazon