manorpunk

[manorpunk]

A migrating phoenix has stopped for a decadent sippy of water from a stagnant puddle in a Walmart parking lot and has ignited the years of accumulated fuel leaks into the surrounding pavement. It's so happy.

[manorpunk]

Alright, I have a cast, I have a setting, I have a plot (like five of them actually but I have a plot for the Big Thing), and I have plenty of ideas for interstitial bits to put in between A and B. I also have... a habit of writing exactly three updates and then bouncing. And the knowledge that I'll never really feel "ready enough" to start - if I'm going to start writing more actual prose and sharing it I'm going to have to step out of my comfort zone, and this time I want to stick with it.

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hey Sunny, you’re in the future. How does the Russo-Ukranian war end?

vtuber-president Sunny Roosevelt: Oh man it was totally hurgled.

hurgled?

Sunny: yeah. hurgled. it’s what the kids are saying nowadays. So like, it eventually got folded into just another front of World War III but what happened was basically the US started to pull out - lol - and so Germany started re-arming and got really involved, like really involved, and so the war dragged on and kept spreading to nearby countries and Germany kept ‘liberating’ towns and putting them under martial law and Europe was like “hey Germany are you trying to conquer Eastern Europe again” and Germany was like “yeah.”

Oh damn. Then what happened?

Sunny: oh, we just let ‘em.

what

Sunny: Yeah. Listen, it’s… they keep doing it, you know? So we decided to let them cook! See what they come up with! Maybe it would actually work out really great if we just stopped fighting it and let Germany be the unquestioned hegemon of Europe for a while.

what

Sunny: You never know until you try, right?

so… how’d it go? did they, y’know…

Sunny: do more genocides? yeah ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[manorpunk]

my favorite worldbuilding detail I've come up with so far is that the Usonian Union subsidizes the remaining Waffle Houses in the midwest autonomous region. It's a joke that plays off of the "Waffle House Index" while also making sense in-universe as a relatively cheap and easy way to keep an eye on the region while also being like a gesture of goodwill. And it also means that Waffle Houses are like DnD taverns where you can get quest offers and run into drifting adventurers.

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bit characters include these three guys all named Justin who set up an unlicensed shrimp farm in an old storage facility out in the Midwest autonomous region, made entirely out of aquarium supplies and scrap metal. They constantly make awful shrimp puns like “I guess you’re a person of shrimpterest” or “are you not shrimptertained?” and they will probably suffer an ignominious death by the end

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what would be a good name for a group of religious assassin ladies who follow an offshoot of Mormonism that claims women can't go to hell? my first idea was "daughters of Abish" but I bet there's something better

"hey isn't this like the third group of emotionally stunted female assassins you've added to the setting" shut up, I don't have a problem I can quit whenever I want

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this is a story about the relationship between core and periphery and centralization vs. decentralization. I'm doing my best to refuse to look at either side with rose-colored glasses: an "authentic tight-knit community" is almost by definition exclusionary and conformist and often relies on misogyny and abusive family dynamics to maintain order, but the efficient central state is "accepting" of people only in the sense that as it sees everyone as instances of throughput and consumption, like pop units in a strategy game. The intractable paradox is that power and authority corrupts people but organized society will always require hierarchy in some form or another to function.

"wow that's a heavy subject, I'm guessing you must have some really nuanced and thoughtful characters who can carry all that thematic weight"

well the centralized core is represented by 'what if the president was an anime girl vtuber' and the decentralized periphery is represented by 'what if Hong Xiuquan was an anprim crypto-Mormon from Iowa'

"...and what's the plot of the story?"

people with stupid names do weird sex stuff

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Wendy's always running into weird girls who are thirsting for her but her midwestern mom-ness makes her painfully oblivious to it

also Wendy has a sidekick, a mysterious girl named Peaches that she found in an abandoned mall. Peaches has no memory of her life before meeting Wendy but also has an encyclopedic knowledge of pre-21st-century historical events and various theories of history, so she plays the cold, aloof mind to Wendy's big heart. plus, y'know, the story needed a girl in a box. it's a vaguely-sometimes-cyberpunk post-post-apocalypse thing, it doesn't feel right without a girl in a box. also it's fun cause it's like

Wendy: welp that's it you're coming with me now so I can protect you Peaches: hey uh despite my stiff and detached exterior I'm kinda getting feelings for you Wendy: well I mean I was starting to feel like your mom or at least your cool aunt so if I were to return that feeling it would feel weird and vaguely incestuous Peaches: is that bad Wendy: >:\ Peaches: last week you said you wanted me to eat oats and seeds out of your hand like a horse Wendy: that's different though Peaches: why Wendy: because you weren't supposed to hear it

[manorpunk]

also Wendy has a sidekick, a mysterious girl named Peaches that she found in an abandoned mall. Peaches has no memory of her life before meeting Wendy but also has an encyclopedic knowledge of pre-21st-century historical events and various theories of history, so she plays the cold, aloof mind to Wendy's big heart. plus, y'know, the story needed a girl in a box. it's a vaguely-sometimes-cyberpunk post-post-apocalypse thing, it doesn't feel right without a girl in a box. also it's fun cause it's like

Wendy: welp that's it you're coming with me now so I can protect you Peaches: hey uh despite my stiff and detached exterior I'm kinda getting feelings for you Wendy: well I mean I was starting to feel like your mom or at least your cool aunt so if I were to return that feeling it would feel weird and vaguely incestuous Peaches: is that bad Wendy: >:\ Peaches: last week you said you wanted me to eat oats and seeds out of your hand like a horse Wendy: that's different though Peaches: why Wendy: because you weren't supposed to hear it

[manorpunk]

oh shit I could reconfigure this to be the swordmaster girlfailure. the only thing that can pierce her cold and painfully awkward exterior is Saintjohn the acceptancepilled whimsymaxxing short king. and of course she would be bisexual and named Zoey. I love the trope of "super-powered hyper-competent woman fighting god himself while the man she could keep in her purse is cheering and shouting "you're doing great sweetie!" from the sidelines

Johnny Newsroom here would probably be swapped with Wendy Saints because I'm liking her more and more as a potential protagonist - the superficial shell of a tough, competent, hard-bitten scavenger on the outside with a sweet but dorky midwestern mom lurking just underneath. Pure of heart and dumb of ass, you might not want her to make tough calls or plan a military operation but she'll always do her damnedest to keep the group all together.

I kinda hate to say it but it's high time Johnny Newsroom got bumped down to secondary character. I just... I love the name so much. Johnny Newsroom! But he's always felt a little thin in terms of personality and if he's a secondary character he can go back to his original characterization of "trying to play the part of a noir private eye but keeps putting his foot in his mouth." (the very first scene idea I had for him was him getting "wendigo" mixed up with "weeaboo.")

“I don’t know. Whenever we try to do stuff, me and Zoey, half the time she starts crying and freaking out, and she says it’s not my fault and she says she likes me, but…” Saintjohn Hadouken sighed through pinched lips, hard enough to make his cheeks puff, and shook his head, “...feels like I’m hurting her.”

Johnny Newsroom looked off into the distance and took a pensive pull of his vape. “She said she likes you?”

“Yeah. I just don’t know what’s going on.”

Johnny turned his head to look him in the eye. “Have you ever dated a trans gal before?”

Saintjohn shook his head. “I’m fuckin figuring out some shit about myself, bro.”

“It’s… she’s… let’s put it this way. Imagine if your dick looked like a scary clown.”

Saintjohn flinched. “I don’t wanna do that. I don’t wanna use my brain powers for evil.”

Johnny continued. “Imagine if every time you took off your pants, a fucked-up evil clown was staring back at you. Imagine trying to get close to someone while you’re like that. Imagine trying to have a sex life. Imagine just trying to love when you’ve got an evil clown under your pants.”

Saintjohn’s frown seemed to stretch beyond the limits of his face. “Can I stop imagining it now?”

Johnny took another pull from his vape. “I don’t think Zoey gets to stop. Everyone’s got a different relationship to their own body, I don’t know Zoey personally, but...” he trailed off, letting Saintjohn fill in the blanks for himself.

Saintjohn leaned against the side of the motorhome and sighed again. “So what am I supposed to do?”

“Do you love her?” Johnny asked.

A pause.

“She makes me happy. When she laughs at my dumbass jokes, I feel like I just cured cancer.”

Saintjohn smiled as soon as he started talking about her. Johnny knew that smile, he felt its residual warmth, the second-hand joy. He wanted the two of them to be happy. He wanted one good thing to happen in the middle of this disaster. The Midwest Autonomous Zone could burn to the ground all over again. As long as he helped two people fall in love, he would have no regrets.

“And, y’know, I wanna get all up in there,” Saintjohn said.

“Okay. Well. To answer your question. Be patient. Let her do things at her pace. Let her figure herself out. Give her space when she needs it, even if you never want to be away from her. If you mess up - and you probably will, we’re only human - swallow your pride, apologize, and try not to do it again. Trust that it will all work out.”

“That sounds really hard.”

Johnny gave him a wry smile. “That’s love.”

[later]

“I’m sorry,” Zoey sniffed, pulling away from Saintjohn, “I just can’t right now. I don’t know if I’ll ever…”

She buried her head in her hands. Her body shuddered with heavy breaths as she began to cry. Saintjohn looked at her. He considered putting a hand on her shoulder, then lowered his arm and simply sat next to her.

“It’s okay,” Saintjohn said, “I understand. You gotta deal with the evil clown.”

Zoey lifted her head. She was too surprised and confused to keep crying. “What?”

[manorpunk]

in the wacky future of 2069, the pope is from Chicago and - no wait that actually happened

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[manorpunk]

Clergy in the Archdiocese of Denver are divided over the handling of a controversial “blood oath” ceremony involving a vice rector and seminarians during a ski trip last year. A group of seminarians studying at Denver’s St. John Vianney Theological Seminary were taken on the trip in January 2024 by then-vice rector of the seminary, Fr. John Nepil, during which they were woken in the middle of the night and invited individually to swear a “blood oath” in a ceremony involving a dagger and a man in a yeti costume. During the bizarre ceremony, video of which was sent to The Pillar by multiple sources in the archdiocese, seminarians were told to scream as if in pain before returning with a bloodied cloth wrapped around their hand and their mouths taped shut, to a room where others waited for their turn to be brought in. The Archdiocese of Denver, in a statement to The Pillar, characterized the event as a “farce” and said that “it was, however, part of a deeply imprudent and inappropriate prank,” and that a full investigation had been completed. “The individual responsible has since been removed from his seminary leadership role and has recommitted to his ongoing personal and spiritual formation,” the archdiocese said. The fallout of the event has divided students, faculty, and clergy in the diocese, with videos and images of the event circulating for several months. Fr. Nepil told The Pillar he had “acknowledged [his] imprudence, apologized to the archbishop and the seminarians involved,” and said that while the event was intended as a “prank,” he took responsibility for what had happened.

[manorpunk]

Possibly the most Burger Reich coded headline I’ve ever read

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We’ve decided to isolate New York New York within a magic barrier, through which, none can cross

[manorpunk]

pov you just interrupted the ritual slaughter of a pregnant mare at the temple of cybele

[manorpunk]

>traveling down the I-70 Pilgrimage Route again >there’s a commotion on the side of the road, bunch of cars parked >people standing around with guns drawn and >wait >is that fucking Wendy Saints >yep that’s Wendy Saints cornered with her hands up >they finally notice me >”stay outta this. this doesn’t concern you.” >Wendy recognizes me and gives me a desperate smile >no idea what’s going on >idgaf, Wendy basically saved my life that one time and I get to return the favor >by stabbing people >Heavenly Ougi「Sundering Wheel of Fate」 >effortlessly slay a dozen goons >”thank you so much omg you saved my life” >hnggggg a buff cowgirl milf is smiling at me and thanking me >I’m still standing in the middle of a pile of corpses >brain starts to shut down >c’mon. this is your chance. you can do this >wrack my brain to come up with a cool one-liner >”y-you too”

>be me >22 year old baby trans in the Most Serene Republic of Greater Caliphornia, year of our lord 2069 >no talents or skills aside from a mastery of the Hissatsu Ougi >(my parents were transphobic ninjas) >like not to brag but I am so unbelievably good at stabbing people >doesn’t exactly qualify me for a desk job tho >too many brain problems for UBI qualifications >wtf the U stands for ‘universal’ how do I not qualify for something universal >whatever fine >try to become a hit(wo)man for los Norteños, they kick me out once they learn I’m actually filipina >(yes my parents were filipino ninjas don’t worry about it) >run into middle-aged academic lady named Maria who’s apparently a big name with the Poaster’s Guild >somehow charm her with my complete lack of skills, charisma, and/or personal hygiene >she says I should join the Westphalian Polycule of Seattle >I do >grad school TA milfs dress me up while I ramble about swords >I’m in heaven >until some lady starts asking me questions about some shit I don’t know anything about >wait this isn’t swords >panic >”uhh… sure?” >”hmm I see interesting” >next day people start acting colder to me >what >ask Maria wtf is going on >apparently I got tricked into taking a stance on some contentious discourse topic and now everyone’s saying I’m a crypto-nobunaguista >said it was probably Vycky, apparently she’s jealous of the attention I’ve been getting >bump into Vycky later that day >instincts kick in >stab her >wait shit oh shit shit shit that wasn’t Vycky >I can’t just stab some random girl and then leave tho, that would send the totally wrong message >and also morally wrong or whatever >drop random girl off at the hospital >fucking. Vycky is there in the hospital lobby >too many witnesses around >I decide that the only rational response to this chain of events is to leave the Westphalian Polycule of Seattle without saying a word to anyone >and steal a bunch of estrogen on my way out >ontheroadagain.VR