cleopatraphouse

[cleopatraphouse]

Semi related but when I was in middle school I made the calculation that if I was attracted to both genders, I could have more sex, so I should be attracted to both genders.

For years I then debated if I actually deserved to call myself bisexual. Wasn't I just faking it? Wasn't I lying? Until sometime in high school when I realized that a monosexual person would not have made that calculation. And wouldn't have wanted to fuck all of Green Day and also The Hex Girls.

bisexuality will really creep up on you huh. one day you're just chillin and suddenly you're like oh my godddddd the other ones

[cleopatraphouse]

Stephanie Boulding, archived from a now-deleted tumblr post.

[cleopatraphouse]

There was a really great podcast called Ephemera that ran from 2019-2022. It was hosted by a cool transgirl named Stephanie Boulding (sometimes written as Stephanie Bee), and it was about various internet phenomena, but it compared things to broader cultural trends. It hit some stumbling blocks during COVID, which I imagine is why it's not around anymore. The Wayback Machine has archives of posts promising new episodes in March 2023, but those have since been deleted (no shade - making things is hard and real life is more important than the internet).

I found Ephemera in 2024, which I know because I sent an email to the creator saying how much I liked it.

Today I went to sample some audio and found out that the feeds had all died, the website (the endearingly-url'd 'welcometotheinter.net') had 404'd, and the podcast was now partially lost media. All that's left are the episodes on Soundcloud (2 - 8), the bonus episodes on the Patreon, the scripts for episodes 16 - 25, episodes on YouTube (18 -25), and episode 14 which was miraculously preserved through the tumblr feed by the Wayback Machine (none of the other episodes though - I checked).

Let this be your regular reminder that anything not saved will be lost. Backup things that are meaningful to you.

At the same time, I do have to appreciate the irony. A show about ephemera, called Ephemera, has become ephemera.

[cleopatraphouse]

[cleopatraphouse]

between a given piece of incest fanfiction and the packaging of a Nesquik cereal box; on basically all levels the Nesquik cereal box is the more offensive and destructive piece of art.

Incest fanfiction:

aimed at a small group of knowledgeable consumers

free from the constraints of capitalism

made for the pure joy of creation

Nesquik cereal box:

aimed at impressionable, yet-to-be-media-literate children

designed to sucker the viewer for money which will be used to further deplete the planet's resources and make it harder for people to live

made by corporate ghouls

[cleopatraphouse]

very rough ideas for the epic-length Worm/Animorphs crossover I'll probably never have the time or energy to write

The Animorphs get back from their first mission with David (he's killed a bird but not rebelled much beyond that) and are Simurgh'd into Bet instead of The Travelers (the canon divergence is that Haywire's tech was left in California instead of Madison, I guess)

First arc is roughly similar to Migration, except instead of finding Cauldron vials, they overhear an armband saying "Visser, down".

When they get Ziz'd the scene transition icon changes from something normal to "���".

They try to go to one of their homes, but their would-be parents react badly to seeing an aged-down version of their child. Maybe Marco sees his mom and freaks out

Visser turns out to be Edriss 562 and Allison Kim operating together as an independent hero. Edriss is unable to return to the Yeerks because an Earth with capes is unconquerable. The two of them pretend to be a tinker by using alien tech.

The Animorphs confronting her sets off a silent alarm, and Protectorate heroes mistake Ax for a villainous Case-53, and correctly recognize the whole group as being Ziz bombs.

The next few arcs are episodic, ATLA-esque, dealing with book-scale plots in individual towns and cities as they travel across the country trying to evade authorities long enough to find someone who can get them home (Marco labels it 'Earth Zu'. Get it? Zoo? No one else thinks its funny either.) At some point they get a clothing tinker to make them proper cape costumes that have full goggles and boots but can still be morphed away.

Ax learns Cinnabon does not exist on Bet (an idea stolen from The Worst Is Yet To Come by Marsa11). He does not take it well.

The Animorphs continuously experience culture shock. Where are all the nineties pop culture references?

Jake's cape name becomes Prince, which is (unknown to him) seen by other capes as kind of a dick move since royalty names fell hard out of fashion after King.

The Slaugherhouse Nine arc happens after maybe three cities? Pure random bad chance leads to them meeting. They kill Cherish easily since she can't hear animal emotions, which immediately blows up the city. This is also the point at which David cuts and runs, after acquiring a dying high-status hero, so he can pass himself off as them.

Ax is captured by Bonesaw, who is FASCINATED by his biology and tortures him until he triggers into a semi-voluntary shapeshifting power which only turns off when he's in morph. Otherwise, he's constantly growing and reabsorbing body parts, I'm specifically picturing his face opening up into a smile like at the end of The Beginning.

The Animorphs eventually make their way to Brockton, two years after coming to Bet. Coil employs them to collect blackmail on Shadow Stalker, and Marco and Jake as bugs witness the locker event.

Coil recruits Taylor directly, and she operates as a duo with Circus, taking down Alabaster and Krieg.

Rachel (Animorphs) enjoys morphing a wolf so that Rachel (Worm) can power her up

Marco and Alec get together

Parallel/comparison between Dinah and Karen

I dunno things Escalate somehow.

Leviathan shows up, and Marco confesses to the Triumvirate that the Animorphs could acquire Eidolon... except it turns out that this Eidolon is David (having been recruited by Contessa). The resulting shouting match stalls the defending capes for a few precious minutes, and the fight does not go well.

Cauldron calls a meeting, and we get an in-universe 'my name is Jake' speech. Jake later talks to Contessa, who tells him that she could have ended the Animorphs' war against the Yeerks in a day, but it never came up as necessary, since the Animorphs were always going to win.

Gold Morning happens somehow look I haven't planned this out moment to moment

Parallel/comparison between Yeerks and Shards

The Animorphs end up in the Cauldron base, and Cassie sees Eden. In a moment of empathy, she reaches down to touch the skin beneath her feet. Immediately, her skin, eyes, and hair begin flickering and changing colors, she screams as something alien suddenly and violently takes her over.

CassiEden confronts Scion.

Something where The Ellimist somehow talks to Contessa? Or the Drode shows up to bring The Animorphs back to Zu? These are scenes I'd really wanna put in but don't know where they'd go.

At least one other Animorph dies, and one of their Bet counterparts is a cape.

[cleopatraphouse]

When I was a kid, my parents made me take swimming lessons. They lasted about an hour, if I'm remembering correctly. And for whatever reason, the pool place we went to made my goggles fog up to the point I could barely see out of them (and they were so tight I got racoon-like rings around my eyes - it'd probably be adorable if I had a photo). When I would take my goggles off at the end of the lesson, the entire world seemed vibrant and saturated for about half an hour, even brown dirt was beautiful, in a similar but distinct way to a good acid trip.

What I'm saying is, I'm never going to be someone who believes that pleasure is something that must be paid for with pain, but there is something to be said for fasting for a bit to appreciate it anew.

[cleopatraphouse]

I finished watching Samurai Jack, and while I think season five is more-or-less the best ending we could have gotten, going directly from season four to season five is the most jarring change in tone within a piece of media since NWA ended Straight Outta Compton with "Something 2 Dance 2".

[cleopatraphouse]

maybe too personal to be admitting on main but if we're being honest the reason Alec is my favorite Worm character is because I relate to being a sad enby femboy with shitty parents who made it impossible to feel or understand emotions normally

[cleopatraphouse]

i know other people have done this as a joke, but if I'd been liveposting my first watch of Fullmetal Alchemist it would have genuinely been like:

why is the bald guy so goofy and over the top

ooh! nice body horror with the bird guy- oh it stopped

why are all the townspeople idiots with no memory

ooh! nice body horror with the dead mom- oh it stopped

the version of Alphonse in Nullmetal Alchemist is genuinely better than canon. "Haha, yeah, swimming. ...I remember that." is so much more fun and I'd argue also more real than "I want to have a body again" or however he says it, being way too direct

this little girl is so annoying

my friend is asking me how i feel about the dog. i hate dogs. this one is not an exception

so this guy killed his wife right

oh that's kinda neat, so when does the fucked up thing happen

...that was it?

...she even gets mercy killed instead of being forced to live in her new body? that's so lame

[cleopatraphouse]

My mom got me a book of (gently bowdlerised) Greek myths when I was a small child. I grew up thinking everyone had a passing familiarity with the more famous stories.

people who learned about greek mythology due reasons that DONT involve having read percy jackson at 12 freak me out, like what the FUCK was going on in your life that you found out that zeus turned into a pigeon to woo his wife like HOW

[cleopatraphouse]

when i was a child and first heard about the multiverse, the first universe i imagined was one that was featureless except for a giant wooden rocking chair, so big it was measured in millions of light years, that creaked back and forth exactly once before the universe ended three seconds after it began

[cleopatraphouse]

ADDENDUM

There's nothing inherently wrong with these, it's conceivably possible a fic could have all of them and be great. But I've literally never seen any of these elements used in a satisfying or even interesting way:

Malicious non-compliance

A superpower based off of video game interfaces

A 'Taylor gets revenge on her bullies' plot

Greg Veder in a prominent role

As someone who has read 1000+ Wormfics, what makes a Wormfic great and what ruins one? <3

So, as with any art, there are no rules, any trope can be used well or poorly. Silly shipfics are just as valid as serious dramas, and each side has its own style guide.

However,

GREAT!:

Exploring characters, locations, or ideas that canon didn't have time for, or exploring them in a way that canon didn't.

Remembering that any element of canon can be dropped if it doesn't serve the story. Have fun with it, put your own spin on things. Give me an interpretation, not a recitation.

Knowing that writing a Wormfic is participating in a conversation that's been happening for over a decade, and at least trying to say something new.

Knowing that Nazis are bad, and WHY they're bad!

Alec is there

RUINOUS!: (and keep in mind these are Wormfic-specific as opposed to just being about art in general, which is why 'too many typos' or 'being Nazi propaganda' aren't on the list)

Following the stations of the canon like a road map

Opening with The Locker Event

Being boring power fantasy slop

Forcing an idea with enough substance for a one-shot to stretch for an entire novel's length

"Vicky, aura."

[cleopatraphouse]

Subs for live action, dubs for animation (usually).

[cleopatraphouse]

Woah there, comrade! Looks like you were about to make a post praising the killdozer guy! Guess you didn't know about his publicly available motivation rants, in which he fantasizes about murdering children because he wasn't the wealthy landlord he wanted to be. Lucky for you I was watching out, you almost called him a folk hero!

[cleopatraphouse]

@ people who disagree with this, listen to the instrumental:

It's right up there with the Yu-Gi-Oh! theme song

the pirate rap from the 4kids one piece dub was awesome, actually. and im tired of pretending its not