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I haven’t even seen the full movie but that tiger is the Best Thing

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time to go full Goncharov on Sanctuary Moon

SANCTUARY MOON FANMEME!

List three favorite scenes that aren't in everyone's top three episodes:

1- the replicator accident b-plot during the reactor leak in episode 211. just the right amount of comedy against the tension of the a-plot, and I swear I saw rubber ducks in the background the whole rest of the season.

2- the last stand of sub-ensign kafara. ha ha eat neutrinos motherfucker.

3- the poetry battle on castorian-three. my friends and I wrote so many shit villanelles after that one

Two unpopular fandom opinions:

I have serious problems with lieutenant/solicitor stasisfic, but not for the whole ethical thing. look I work on stasis pod tech and there is no way multiple people can go on a dream journey together during cryostasis, not with how current pod resource sharing is set up. if you gotta write stasisfic put it in a historically accurate setting, like episode 424.

I never liked the musical episode. sorry sorry (not really sorry)

One thing you want spotlighted at the next MoonMoonCon:

if they could just put a big display with the EPISODE 776 HOSSEIN SHOWER SCENE on infinite repeat i could die happy

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was at PAX East and realized:

Next year there could be Murderbot cosplay

I hope I hope I hope

WAIT

There could be SANCTUARY MOON cosplay

I can’t pull off the silver bodysuit but MAYBE

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FEETS

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no YOU’RE surreptitiously filming your husband grooving to “Staying Alive” while he kneads dough

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melusine's hound

A bit of writing I muddled around with recently. Content warning: references to domestic violence, murder, loss.

A faerie truth-seeker seems like a contradiction. We are, after all, creatures of glamour and deception, and our ability to make the world seem as it is not, is part of what makes us fae.

But nobody would call me a contradiction before my Lady Melusine, to whom my service is bound and ordered. If Lady Melusine orders us to be horses, we are horses; if she orders us to dance, we dance; if she orders me to be a truth-seeker, then that is what I am. Under her charge I can no more accept lies than a human could chew through iron. I am her hound.

And she takes my duties very seriously.

When first she set me on my mission, the other ladies of the Court gossiped that it was because Lady Melusine was lonely. It may well have been so, since there are few of her kind among the Court. Others said she was seeking a descendant or some trace of shapeshifter blood lingering among the humans.

"There are tales," she told me, "of some like me. Who took a human husband, only to find herself spurned upon discovery. Some not like me, who did not choose a husband but were snared by lost skins. The changelings tell me there are many such stories. Go and find the truth of them." Thus was the first part of my charge given.

I pursued it well. I would arrive in a town, listen to the tales, listen to the rumors, even make an appearance as a wandering trader or an alewife to gather the pieces of what had happened.

The results? A few lost fae found again, one or two of their faeblood children. A swanmay who'd never mentioned her three human boys when she'd returned to our lands. A widower still marked with a lamia's snarling curse, vivid enough I could sense the power of it from across the town.

I reported these duly to my Lady, as the second part of my charge, and escorted some of the children back with me at their asking.

Occasionally the stories would lead me to a widower stunned by the treasure he'd held for a short while: a perfectly human wife who'd come from far away, but who'd loved him like sunlight. Who had been lost to storm or sudden illness or childbirth, and he'd talked about her again in town. Leading the gossip to invent the explanations for how did someone like him end up with someone like her .

When I encountered those cases, I'd choose my disguise carefully. Often I'd wear a priest's robes for those visits, to quell the gossip and testify to the true sorrow of losing a human beloved, and to chastise the gossips into silence. It wasn't part of my Lady's charge, but for some of those widowers, I sat with them a while, laying a balm upon their burdened shoulders. In one case I even sent a wetnurse.

More often, the stories were spread over a darker moment, like paint smeared over rot.

A fisherman comes home one day with a wife, strange and silent, who has no interest in the few gatherings of the village. Never made a sound when the villagers did see her. Seemed too beautiful for him, to some; a fey kind of woman, paired with the sullen coarseness of the fisherman.

Then she up and disappears one day, leaving him alone. He's always been a man of few words, and now he's even more silent. When pressed, though, he tells a story that's got echoes throughout the coast. A seal skin, stolen and hidden; a strange and beautiful woman to live with him; a discovery; a departure. And so the selkie returns to the waters.

And again. A sheepherder wins a favor from a bee-woman, weds her, beds her, lives happily. Then his brother gets jealous and tries to take her, and she turns back into the queen and swarms her hive away.

And again. A mer-girl trades her freedom for a trinket from the beachcomber, comes to live with him. Bears him a child. But can't live without the call of the sea. One day he breaks his promise and raises his hand in anger against her, then she and the child are gone, and he's left alone.

Even close to the cities. A hunter brings a beautiful garment to the market, offers it as tribute to the lord, and is handsomely rewarded. Says it's the work of his strange, silent wife, who he found deep in the woods one day. The lord wants more, offers gold, then offers more gold on top of that when the hunter brings another robe, then another. Till he comes empty-handed one day, and says his wife turned into a crane and flew away rather than weave another robe.

The same story, one so close to my Lady Melusine's past. Take away the glamour that human tales have spread over them, and the story is simple.

She came from somewhere far away. She didn't know our customs. She may not have known our language, so little did she speak. He guarded her jealously. And then one day she was gone. He says they quarreled. He says he caught her in her true form. He says she escaped him. He says she's gone.

I hear the words, but scent the lies beneath. Like feeling for objects hidden under damask. I can put aside the romance of the selkie bride, the tragedy of a broken vow, the temptation of keeping an otherworldly being for oneself. Instead there are only the outlines: A woman isolated. An argument. A woman gone.

Adding the rumors of our glamor makes the story into a tragedy, but the rot under the paint is the same. A corpse leads to accusations, but a fae disappearance leads to sympathy and romance.

I cannot tell you how many bodies I have dug up, bodies of women who were supposed to have turned back into a bird and flew away. Bones dredged from rivers and wells and inlets, bones of women who were thought to have flown away, found their skins and won their freedom.

The women always relish the chance to see their husbands again. Only this time, they go accompanied by the fiercest of hounds. Somehow the husbands do not have much to say after we visit.

Thus do I fulfill the last part of my Lady's charge. Go and find the truth of them. If true fae they be, bring back word of them to the Court. If not, set hell at the heels of those who would use the legend of Melusine as disguise for their sins.

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do you have an appointment?

Saw a post some time ago about a person dealing with negative self-talk and intrusive thoughts by inventing an internal secretary. I think they named her Barbara, and were picturing her carefully and gently but firmly escorting the irate "callers" out the door of their mental office, explaining that yes, their concerns will be heard, but now is not a good time to yell nonstop at the rest of us.  (I'm almost certainly misremembering it, apologies to original poster, but this is what I took away.)

I loved that idea. It's a caring way to respond to the concerns that may be fueling intrusive or angry or self-hating thoughts, without granting them full sway over the brain and heading into a spiral. 

I've had some success in therapy with the parts-work model (it's got some fancy acronym, IFS or something).

I'm also a fan of two of the Greatest Secretaries Known to Fiction.

Thus my inner secretary is not Barbara, but an amalgam of Csevet from The Goblin Emperor and Cliopher from the Nine Worlds.

Give 'em hell, Kip. (But in a nice way.)

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oh goddammit

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Made this for my niece a few years ago, pre-COVID I think.

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Yeahhhhh.

The World reversed and Page of Pentacles

The whole messed-up world may be too much to think about, but you can focus on taking care of your own small piece of it.

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got a hankering for some of those travel posters for fictional locations

for the Nine Worlds specifically

"Zunidh! Where the Sun-on-Earth radiates his blessings!"

"Surf the Flying Pines of Amboloyo!"

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