christinareborn

Some fuckstick neighbor just blasted one of those horn type noise maker things at 2:30 in the fucking morning. If I find out which ass hat did that I am going to punch them in the face.

I fucking hate neighbors. And I fucking detest New Year's. If this holiday had a face, I would shit in it. It's not as bad as the fourth of July, but still... any more of that shit and I'm gonna scream out the door, "SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!"

Just had the wildest fucking dream. I'm at one of my childhood houses with my family, playing with the cat, and then the cat runs off and catches a mouse. Before I can congratulate the cat for its catch, this mouse shits itself. Nay, what actually happens is this mouse produces an absolute fire hose of shit. It's like little thing's anus became a portal to the shit dimension and these extra long hot dog sized shits, but thinner, come blasting out like they're under the same pressure coming out of a fire hose.

Like really, this mouse is absolutely blasting ass ropes over everywhere at high velocity. It's on the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling, on people, all over the furniture, just absolutely everywhere. It is pandemonium! Everybody is freaking out. The cat is freaking out, I'm freaking out, my parents are freaking out, everybody is freaking the fuck out because this mouse is producing more shit than could possibly exist in a being so small. This mouse's mutant name would be Ass Blaster.

It finally stops, and I'm like, "I cannot help clean this because I have to go to work." I spontaneously get clean for work without any effort, managed to get out of the house without stepping on any shit (which must be due to the same magic powers that cleaned me), and I go outside.

What I find outside is this massive storm in the distance sitting on the horizon like an angry elder god ready to end humanity. It is this massive wall of weather backlit in red like it's the Upside Down from Stranger Things, but without the lightning, only I'm being blasted with gale force winds that almost knocked me over, and rain is with it too, because it's a hurricane or similar. I immediately go back inside and say something like "well I guess I can't go to work without dying from the giant storm," and then the dream ended and I woke up.

Now I'm pondering what the inside of a magical lock would look like. Because there's two particular kinds of magical locks I'm thinking about:

1. Magical locks where the key is just a rod or a flat piece of metal with runes or other enchantments on the key that magically interact with the lock to open. Useful if you need multiple people to be able to access something, while still restricting access. Would make copying keys difficult, I imagine a lot of artificers go into key and lock making.

2. Magical locks without even a keyhole because they're blood-locked to you so all you have to do is grab and pull to open and nobody else can do that (maybe with you pushing some intentional magic into it or using a password you think at the lock at the same time, for added security, so nobody can force you to open it).

Either way, there's no tumbler, there's no pins or other mechanism inside. It's all magic. The only thing you need is the shackle or a bolt or whatever.

Literally pick-proof, the mundane way. Possibly there might be magical ways of picking it, but with a simple blood-lock (using a drop of your blood to bind it to yourself only) that would be made a lot more difficult. And such locks are often Adamant. You'd either have to be very skilled at picking magical locks, or you'd have to use magic to completely destroy the lock.

Now of course there are also spells you can put on the lock or the locked box/vault itself that can hit the would-be picker with offensive spells or trap spells. Or, if it's sensitive enough, destroy the contents before the lock can be picked.

But truthfully, I'm more interested in the physical mechanism. How similar to a mundane lock does the inside of a magical lock have to be? How much mechanism needs to be there? On the simple end: Obviously, since magic can move single items around, the inside can be as simple as the shackle goes in, a magical bolt locks the shackle in place. Just the two moving parts. Or better yet, have the magic hold the shackle in place and move it all on its own; just the one moving part.

On the complicated end: as fucking complicated on the inside as you want it to be. Gears, levers, springs, clockworks galore. As many runic arrays as you can fit into the lock and/or the vault door, each of them a different trap. Multiple bolts. Hell, multiple shackles, even. But in the end, one important factor is "if someone sucked all the magic out of this thing, would it open or would it be stuck closed? And which do you prefer?"

Obviously the "shackle only" design would fall open immediately if its magic was drained (which isn't an easy task in itself). "Bolt and shackle," with no keyhole, you'd have to either find a way to shimmy the bolt open, or destroy the lock. Or use your own magic to move the bolt. Same with more complicated locks.

I am, of course, interested in whether a magical lock could be made to be pick-proof. I've seen lots of lock-picking videos on YouTube by two different channels, LockPickingLawyer and McNallyOfficial. Most locks made are pretty shitty. Masterlock locks basically almost unlock if you so much as sneeze at them. The men on both of those channels can basically pick most locks in like three seconds. LockPickingLawyer has picked locks with all kinds of random things, from pieces of aluminum cans, to twigs he found outside, and many other things. McNallyOfficial has a recurring schtick of "This is (X brand make and model) lock. It can be opened with (another of the same lock)" and then he hits one lock with the other and it opens. He also uses pieces of aluminum cans. One video I saw had a stack of Masterlock locks at least ten locks thick, all held in place with vices, and he picked one after the other in a total of like ten seconds. All he did was ram a rake pick into the keyholes so violently that he basically was showing "hey, these take no fucking skill at all to pick. A toddler could pick this."

I think the most worrying videos I ever saw were the many, many, MANY videos by LockPickingLawyer where he picked the locks of GUN SAFES so quickly and easily that yes, a toddler could literally pick one of these things open in seconds. At least one of his "pick the lock with a random twig" videos was him doing that to the lock of a gun safe. I have concluded from years of these videos that "gun safe" is an oxymoron.

So yeah. Hence my wondering if magical locks could be pick proof. Basically me wondering if a pick-proof lock is even possible.

Oh and that reminds me: a few days ago I saw a video saying that before reliable locks, if someone needed to secure something, the best way to go about it was put it in a puzzle box. That way, either you have to know the exact trick of how to open it and be able to do so, or you have to be smart enough to figure it out, or you break the thing open to get at the stuff inside. So another possibility is "magical puzzle box." Or maybe a lock where you have to use the right sequence of complicated, difficult spells to open it.

Or something similar to the meme where the burglar forces the man to give his password, a keyboard flips down, and the second password is some ridiculously complicated piano piece.

On the magical security side, there's also spells that refuse to unlock the lock at all, even for the one person they're keyed to, if anyone else is in the room with them.

Anyway, another reason I started thinking about all this is because there's a scene in the current chapter I'm working on where one of the characters has to pick an extremely complicated and dangerous magical lock, that's part of a massive vault door.

Done rambling now.

Why does the food pantry place always insist on giving me these massive bottles of vegetable oil? I mean, 48 oz worth of vegetable oil is ridiculous. Who uses that much oil? Why do they even sell them this size? I have never in my life been able to use the entire bottle before it expires. Seriously, I'm doing good to use an entire 6.2 oz bottle of sesame seed oil in an entire month, and I actually like the taste of that. Who the fuck can possibly use 48 oz of vegetable oil in less than a year? What are they using it for? Are they using it for sex lube? Cuz that's the only thing I can think of to explain it. I can't even begin to fathom what you would need that much vegetable oil for.

The oil in question:



I literally never ask for it, and they just give it to me anyway. I'm too polite to refuse it. Getting better at telling them no to things they give me that I have no use for or can't stand, but it's a work in progress.