invariant-ice

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It’s a content warning to you. To me it’s the reason it’s on my reading list

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one of baru's biggest weak spots is her pride which is why her most formidable tormentor apart from herself is a catty gay man who invokes tain hu the way people say 'oh yeah? Your mom' and somehow wins every argument

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COOLEST MOTHS AWARDS: Ceranchia apollina; the "Ghostly Silkmoth" (Saturniidae)

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a good book is one that makes you want to kill yourself. a bad book is one you feel safe recommending to someone else

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ultimately you can't even really judge what you would have done in baru's shoes because could any of the rest of us even pull tain hu. that's what i thought

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whether its astrology, racial-character theories, alpha male ontology, or attachment-style shit, people want ONE thing: systems. they want to build and apply systems. they want to construct mental contraptions filled with categories, relations, rules, and consistency. the people want math; the people want algebras.

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[so horny my eyes are defocusing] maybe i ccould be your sword

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You ever think about what differentiates us from the enemy?

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first base is murdering you. second base is ressurecting you from the grave. third base is murdering you a second time

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the imperial accountant baru cormorant, and the duchess of vultjag

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— The unknown book pages.

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“aminata is straight” you don’t know her like i know her

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Let's load the gun (They won't be missing you) Let's load the gun (See you when the wrath comes)

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At this point everyone's gotta be so done with Jedao's cockroach behaviour. Can't he stay fucking dead for once or at least do us the courtesy of staying out of our business

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I think if you showed baru cormorant excel spreadsheets she would feel wonder at its arithmetic capabilities and profound pleasure at her command of such a quick witted tool but after a few hours sunk into playing with it the cold fist of dread that this was a masquerade tool - provided her to poison her figures? - would close in her chest and she’d queasily redo all the sums by hand just to double check and finding nothing would wonder if it wasn’t an exercise to steadily sow her faith in the technology and make her complacent in its whisperings so that one errant sum arced from the heart of the empire like an arrow could unravel the intestines of her lifelong work and she would come to the troubled conclusion that she could never trust their solutions meanwhile the apparitor is like you aren’t using Microsoft excel? and baru is like (lie) I found its results finicky, I trust my own hand better & apparitor’s like really now? You had trouble with it? Odd… And their brow furrows and the white hot knife of triumph like a darting fish flashes through baru’s mind like I’ve caught them guilty now! meanwhile exceedingly hot women are begging to have sex with her and she’s like don’t bother me right now I need to think on how to outsmart Microsoft excel

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The effects of face paint on Harrowhark's psyche

I've now cosplayed Gideon Nav 3 times, with my wife along as Harrow every time. Naturally, this has included full face paint for both of us each time and I have some thoughts.

Let me start by asserting that everything Muir writes in TLT about the face paint is accurate. Rubbing off your lips first, smearing into gray where the black and white meet, the way sweat makes it ooze but not run. I can't say if Muir (a known Homestuck) ever cosplayed as a troll, but I'm positive she tested out the practicality of the skull face paint or otherwise has first hand experience with extensive use of grease paint. Also, the way she describes normal people flinching when they see you is spot on.

I've noticed while putting on the make up that once most of my skin is covered, any flesh tones sticking out start to become unsettling. Specifically, the red/pink of the inner mouth and around the eyes jump out upsettingly. Every time I've done skull paint I find myself meticulously trying to patch over these edges of skin, despite knowing that it's inside skin that Shouldn't Have Make Up On It. Once my face is monochrome, I don't want to be able to see a scrap of real human under there. Smiling, or otherwise opening your mouth wide enough to see the pink, looks UNSETTLING. My own skin causes the uncanny valley effect. You see where this is going. In NtN we learn Harrowhark disassociates often enough that Crux isn't surprised or concerned to see "Harrow" insisting she's someone else. Obviously this is due to her schizophrenia, and perhaps trauma besides. But it doesn't account for every aspect of why Harrow's "like that." On her most lucid days Harrow ignores her body to the point of sweating blood and passing out. She goes entire days without eating. She thinks of herself as a skeleton unfortunately covered in flesh. She sleeps in her paint.

All of which is heinous, but that last one has stuck with me. From age 13-18 I barely glanced down while I showered and whatever I saw I basically blocked out. I wore underwear and a bra under my pajamas to sleep every night. I was going through the wrong puberty, "my body was in open rebellion" as I liked to say at the time, and the only way to cope was to bind it down and pretend it wasn't happening. By Gideon's narration in HtN one gets the impression most nuns of the Ninth are putting their paint on after breakfast and taking it off when they get home. It's not even expected the average person wears it every time they leave the house. But Harrow regularly only takes her paint off in order to redo it. I suspect a combination of being the most brainwashed person in her own cult, knowing how she was conceived, and the regular disassociation make it very difficult for Harrow to conceptualize that she actually lives in a body. If she faced that fact head on she'd have to ask why it so often feels someone else is using her body. She'd have to cope with owning this body, being a part of this body, that was bought with the blood of 200 children who should have been her peers and friends. Instead she pretends it's an object on loan from them. And she does it with 10 layers of black petticoats and so much paint she never has to see her own skin.

Which brings me to the final thing I've noticed wearing full face paint. It dehumanizes you to yourself and everyone around you. I couldn't read my own expressions in a mirror. Even people who understood and were delighted with my cosplay were visibly nervous talking to me. You don't look like a person. Studies have shown that faces wearing heavy make up are ranked as harder to read and perceived as less empathetic. It's a particularly insidious trap of patriarchy that many women find self esteem in wearing make up, while that very act makes everyone around them treat them more callously. And, worst of all, if you stop wearing it once you're used to it, your naked face is shocking. You look sick due to your colors being less bold and the normal small flaws of your face appear unbearably ugly. With all this in mind, Harrow has trapped herself in a feedback loop of not being able to witness her own face and becoming more and more disgusted with the flesh and person underneath whenever she has to glance at it.

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Level 1: Porn with plot

Level 2: Porn with social commentary

Level 3: Porn with troubling philosophical implications

Level 4: Porn with maddening revelations of humanity’s place in the cosmos

Level 5: Porn with math