Best bad idea I've had all week

User requests equipment upgrade.

"You may have this non-upgrade if you simply say 'Please.' However, if you would like the upgrade, you may attempt to best a member of the Help Desk in a battle of strength, wits, or cunning." ("Oh, you want a wireless keyboard? You have to run a mile faster than so-and-so.")

The expense of the upgrade determines the level of challenge presented. I foresee this into each department eventually becoming a fiefdom with their own champions, perhaps with skilled Ronin for hire across departments as a budgetable line item expense.

There might be a short story or YouTube movie in this concept.

Or maybe I simply need coffee and/or a nap.

How do my hands know?

When I was a kid, and even into adulthood, my hands would spontaneously, for lack of a better word, delaminate in times of stress. Having more or less successfully dealt with whatever chronic factors were triggering it - I suspect a combination of life stresses and an undiagnosed low-grade gluten sensitivity are primarily to blame - that has more or less become a thing of the past.

However, one particular expression of this trait still bedevils me - on deadlift days when anything over 450 is on the bar, my callouses want to get the hell out of Dodge, leaving me with some tender red circles, to be caulked with chalk dust and Neosporin and secured with band-aids.

I strongly suspect this is nothing at all like what jaylake had in mind when, in Green, the titular ninja anoints the bodies of the dead with "the red and the white." Of course, since he doesn't specify, I can project inaccurately, but my inability to take most of what I read seriously isn't his problem as an author, it's my own ridiculousness as a reader. (Once I finally finish the book, I'll probably sketch a review here, as I'm finally approaching the endgame. I've been holding off doing likewise for the "Promethean Age" series by matociquala until I finish all the books in that cycle, the last of which I have recently begun.)

Speaking of ridiculous reader behaviors, I am currently in the process of reciprocally flogging my collaborator into generating their take on the opening of our shared story because, frankly, I'm anxious to see what kind of curiosities fall out of their head.