Zed_Colonel

Dad, stepdad, software engineer (COBOL, .NET, C++, Rust), complex systems addict.
GH:

[Zed_Colonel @Zed_Colonel]

No one should be immune from the sharp tongue of the true satirist

[Emily Youcis @AlfredAlfer77]

I consider myself a magnanimous person. I would consider The JD Vance Show to be "a light ribbing." However, I can do much, much worse. I am simply doing what JD recommends here - using the power and leverage I have to pressure The Regime into doing what is best for White America. JD and friends are aware of my humble demands:

- Condemn and stop this war. End all military and financial aid to Israel permanently.
- Deport ALL ~15 million illegal aliens, revoke all H1Bs and permanently end all legal methods for non-White immigrants to enter this country.
- End Palantir's contract with Israel and solely use it for deportations and other non-invasive, helpful domestic matters.

I laugh while typing this because the idea of the candidate backed by a defense company which is thoroughly invested in fighting a multi-front war being Anti-war is absurd. Nevertheless, these are my demands.

End this war, decouple from Israel, execute actual mass deportations, and permanently enact laws so this filth can never enter the country again, and I make everyone look super cool in the next JD Vance Show Episode. I can even make a super awesome one just in time for the midterms. 😎🔥

Continue on the suicidal path you are on however, not just for Republicans but for the entirety of White America, and it will be more gay rape and humiliation, I'm afraid.

The future of The JD Vance Show lies in your hands. I hope you all choose wisely.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

A small blue-roofed building on a corner in Inglewood, California. A walk-up window. A sign above it:

CALIFORNIA'S ORIGINAL SOFT SERVE — SINCE 1946

I read it three times.

A small cartoon ice cream cone in a chef's hat smiled at me from the sign. He had been smiling at the same corner for eighty years.

I bowed to him.

A man walking a small dog passed behind me, paused, and looked at the sign for one second too long, as if he had also just decided that the sign deserved something.

I walked up to the window. A young woman leaned out. Name tag MAVIS, ponytail, summer job.

"Hi, welcome to Foster's. What can I get for you?"

"...The eldest item on your menu."

"...Sorry?"

"The dish that has been here since 1946."

"Oh. The soft serve cone."

"Then the soft serve cone."

"You want it dipped?"

"...Dipped."

"Yeah. We flip the cone upside down into chocolate. Hardens around it."

"...You take the offering. You turn it upside down. The chocolate seals around it."

"...So that's a yes?"

"That is a yes."

In my country, a man entering a new house washes his hands and his face at the gate. The water shocks him. The shock cleanses him. This was the same thing. Mavis did not need to know.

She turned to the machine. An older man at the back, white hair, apron, name tag BERT, walked up and took the cone from her. He carried it three steps to a small metal vat, turned it upside down, lowered it into the chocolate, held it for one second, lifted it. The dip slid down the sides and hardened almost instantly. A small dark roof over the white inside.

He handed it through the window.

"Three minutes, sir."

"...Three minutes."

"It melts. Eat it under three."

"...The dip lasts three minutes."

"After three, it goes."

In my country, we have a word for things that last only three minutes. We have the same word for things that last only one season, and for things that last only one life. It is the same word. Bert did not need to know.

I bowed to the cone before I touched it.

A man behind me in line, in a Dodgers cap, holding his daughter's hand, said quietly, "did he just bow to the ice cream."

His daughter, maybe six, said, "yeah."

"...Why."

"Because."

The man removed his cap and held it against his chest. He did not look at me. He looked at the window.

I took my first bite.

The chocolate cracked, thin and clean, the way pottery breaks when it is meant to. Underneath, the soft serve was cold and gentle, the way a small kindness is gentle. The cone, when I bit through it, made the soft folded-paper sound a folded paper makes when you finally open it.

I made a small involuntary sound.

The girl behind me laughed once.

I bowed to her, from the window, with the cone in my hand.

She did not say anything. She just bowed back, deeply, the way only a six-year-old bows, with the whole upper body, because she does not yet know that adults bow only with the head.

At one minute thirty, the chocolate roof was gone and most of the swirl with it. The cone had gone soft at the rim. I was a man eating against a clock that had been set, not by Bert, but by the chocolate itself, by the temperature of an afternoon, by the eighty years.

At two minutes, an elderly woman walked up to the window. She was holding the hand of a small boy.

She looked, for one full second, at the soft-serve machine through the window. Then she said, quietly:

"Mavis, baby."

"Hi, Grandma."

"...You started this week."

"Yeah."

"You know this machine."

"It's a Taylor."

"...That is the same machine I stood behind, when I was your age."

Mavis blinked once. She did not say anything. She turned to the machine and pulled the lever. The same low, contented mechanical sound. The same swirl rising into the cone.

The grandmother turned, saw me with my half-eaten dip in my hand, and bowed. One inch. Not deep. The way one veteran bows to another in a parking lot, when neither of them expected to be recognized that day.

I bowed back. The same inch. No deeper.

She turned to her grandson. "Tell the lady what you want."

The boy said, "dipped." Just the one word.

I had thirty seconds left on mine. I ate the rest. I bit through the waffle. I tasted, at the very bottom of the cone, the small pocket of soft serve that always hides at the bottom of these things, the way the kindest part of a kind person hides at the bottom of them, and is found only by people who finish.

I swallowed.

There was no bell. There was only the machine, going back to silence, and the line behind me, moving forward by one.

I bowed to the window. Mavis waved without turning her head. Bert nodded without lifting his eyes from the cone he was now dipping for the boy. The grandmother did not turn back to me, but lifted her free hand once, a small backward wave, the way a person waves who does not need to look to know.

I stepped away from the window. I did not stagger.

A man who has eaten an eighty-year-old cone must walk away straight, out of respect for the machine that did not refuse to keep going.

In the parking lot, the small blue roof caught the late afternoon light and looked, for one moment, exactly the way it had looked in 1946, in a black-and-white photograph that I had not seen, and that I now somehow remembered.

A country that keeps its own name on its own corner, for eighty years, is a country.

A samurai does not dip his sword in chocolate.

But he bows, in his head, to a man who has dipped ten thousand cones, kindly, for forty-five years, in the same window, in the same blue building, on the same corner.

The cone melts. The custom does not.

I am not on the wall.

I am in the line.

[Zed_Colonel @Zed_Colonel]

@boneGPT

[Zed_Colonel @Zed_Colonel]

Do you remember when you joined X? I do! #MyXAnniversary

[Ｂｅｅｍａｘｘｅｒ @GPT_Neanderthal]

Germans lose their shit after glimpsing the Midwest (19th century tweet)

[Zed_Colonel @Zed_Colonel]

@GPT_Neanderthal @Mortiguin91 There’s a reason that so many German-descent Americans live in Ohio (my family is such). The suitability to agrarian lifestyles and similar seasonal rhythms call to the Saxon soul.

[Peter Savodnik @petersavodnik]

This is like Howard Zinn for Dummies. It's the most cartoonish, intellectually dishonest version of the American founding. It's as if the future congresswoman dropped out of the eighth grade and then picked up a few fancy words in the big city.

[Zed_Colonel @Zed_Colonel]

@generic_void @jjohnpotter Seems Japan and Venezuela took the brunt of the tension release today, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Hayward (long overdue) pops off this summer

[Zed_Colonel @Zed_Colonel]

@Asmongold is a goddamned legend for this. 7 hours of staring into the abyss and refusing to flinch.

https://t.co/tHa36UGs1C

[Zed_Colonel @Zed_Colonel]

@selentelechia Very based take

[Sir Canem VI 🌲 @Moesawyrd]

When your police take a young girl who was raped by pakistani immigrants and return her not to her parents, but to the pakistani immigrants and tell them to 'have fun with her,' your entire system has to burn. Mass executions, pogroms.

[Zed_Colonel @Zed_Colonel]

To think that the government that was just exposed for covering up the grooming and rape of a quarter-fucking million girls cares one bit about children is the height of willful ignorance and stupidity.

[Neil Oliver @thecoastguy]

I know I'm droning on about the social media ban - but I cannot believe the numbers on here believing it's to do with children's welfare. There are actual heartfelt debates about how the ban - only a lever for digital IDs - comes from a place of caring even a jot about children.

[Zed_Colonel @Zed_Colonel]

So fucking dark

[John Carter @martianwyrdlord]

"Many of these victims had themselves been born of rape to mothers who suffered identical exploitation."

[Zed_Colonel @Zed_Colonel]

@bayonetbastard @AlfredAlfer77 @elonmusk @nikitabier Very on brand

[David Santa Carla 🦇 @TheOnlyDSC]

Patriot. Traitor.

[Logan Kilpatrick @OfficialLoganK]

Ilya was right and predicted much of this

[Mega MAGA Republican Maplefritos, Esq. 🏴‍☠️ @maplefritos]

People who can watch this and hate on Elon are absolute dogshit human beings. Change my mind.

The humility to be like “I was really just kinda YOLOing this thing, didn’t think we would get here”. Most people would get up there and jerk themselves off. Bezos would have done a yoga pose to suck his own dick while everyone watched.

The big nerd just wants to build cool shit and maybe help us be a better civilization in the process. People hate the mirror he holds up to their failures.

[Zed_Colonel @Zed_Colonel]

The only way out of our civilizational pickle is to accelerate as fast as we can

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Upside seeking vs downside protection
Curiosity vs anxiety
acceleration vs stagnation

Choice is yours.

[Zed_Colonel @Zed_Colonel]

@CrekAppreciator Corn, dairy, meat, beer, they do a body good