sayitwithsarcophilus

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

You've heard of "the city is a character" or "the spaceship is a character" - well, in the Benjamin January books, the humidity is a character.

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

"Ground provisions" is such a delightful name for root vegetables.

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

I can remember what it felt like to be a kid well enough, but it's not helping me much in my current job because my 11 year old self was kind of a judgy little teacher's pet and would have had notably less patience with the "challenging behaviors" students than I currently do.

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

One part of speculative fiction fandom is discovering that people who occupy a similar place in the political compass to you, and have fairly compatible values regarding real-world issues, may have vastly different beliefs about the comparative gravity of imaginary sins (in the sense of not just being sins performed by imaginary people so no real person was hurt, but in the sense of only being possible in speculative fiction contexts because they require magic, technology, or metaphysics that don't exist in our world). And you have to live with that. Because cancelling someone for their opinion about whether stealing the bodies of your descendents versus draining the life energy of the planet is a morally superior way to gain immortality is the sort of behavior that the term "fandom wank" was created for.

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

OK, taking my own crack at it:

Second House: Two is for discipline, heedless of trial. Consummate professionalism: a crisp chypre with white leather and green herbs.

Third House: Three for the gleam of a jewel or a smile. Sparkle and glamour: Champagne grape, golden musk, tuberose, sweet oude, and toasted amber.

Fourth House: Four for fidelity, facing ahead. Unto the breach: Red musk, smoke, leather, warm spices, and a pop of bubblegum.

Fifth House: Five for tradition and debts to the dead. A homey offering to the spirits: fresh-baked bread, beeswax candles, and joss sticks.

Sixth House: Six for the truth over solace in lies. Long days in the Library: Strong oolong tea, soft leather, vanillic old paper accord, and gray musk.

Seventh House: Seven for beauty that blossoms and dies. A sickroom bouquet and a consumptive beauty's bloodstained hanky: Tea rose, lilac, neroli, fern, dragon's blood, and linen accord.

Eighth House: Eight for salvation no matter the cost. An austere ecclesiastical incense blend: frankincense, myrrh, cedar, and white sandalwood.

Ninth House: Nine for the Tomb, and for all that was lost. The chilly darkness of black musk, black peppermint, and galbanum, bone-white sandalwood and white tea, and dusty vetiver.

I wonder if BPAL has talked to Tamsyn Muir or her representatives about doing Locked Tomb tie-in perfumes.  Anything that firmly rooted in the goth/fannish nerd overlap territory of the Venn Diagram seems like it should be right up BPAL’s alley.

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

Some people were talking about how "lesbian necromancers in space," while true, doesn't really convey the experience of reading Locked Tomb or let prospective readers know whether or not they're likely to enjoy it, and I started thinking about other potential taglines.

"Warhammer 40K for girls" caught my attention, although that implies a weird gender essentialism beyond just "Locked Tomb has female protagonists and less hypermasculinity." IE:

Boys like space fascism; Girls like space feudalism

Boys like military scifi; Girls like murder mysteries

Boys like Tomb Worlds; Girls like millennia-old haunted houses

Boys like No Hugging, No Kissing; Girls like lesbian yearning and toxic immortal polycules

Boys like giant pauldrons; Girls like corpse paint

Boys like Britain; Girls like New Zealand

Boys like No Girls Allowed; Girls like "society has eliminated all preexisting forms of sexism but replaced it with the jock/nerd binary"

Boys like chainswords; Girls like rapiers

Boys like Space Wizard God Emperors to be mythical and mysterious; Girls like Space Wizard God Emperors to be Some Guy

Boys like giant transhuman warrior-monks; Girls like scrawny goth wizard nuns

Everybody likes Catholicism and skulls

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

Seeing someone (derogatorily) refer to Palamedes & Camilla Locked Tomb as "het Sherlock" made me wonder if Tamsyn Muir, as a "not conventionally romantic but emotionally intense m/f life partnership" aficionado, enjoys Joanlock.

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

Addams family member concept:

A tree-hugging, nature-loving, hippie aunt. But she loves specifically all of the most disgusting and horrifying things in nature.

She admires the way predators eviscerate their prey. She finds the lethal mating habits of insects romantic. She always offers people fruits and snacks, forgetting that they're poisonous and most people haven't developed immunity.

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

One problem with functioning labels that I haven't seen discussed is that, even if you're talking about people who are objectively significantly disabled, everyone has different internal standards for what various levels of severity mean.

I've seen "profound developmental disabilities" mean anything from "adult who can talk, socialize, make a peanut butter sandwich (with minimal prompting), and put on their own socks, but who struggles to understand any narrative more complicated than an episode of Bluey" to "adult who is only just getting the hang of pointing to the picture of the thing they want."

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

My astrology phase was middle school/junior high (my mom had a copy of Linda Goodman's Sun Signs), so when I encounter grown adults who take that stuff seriously my inner emotional reaction is not dissimilar to discovering a Baby-Sitters Club discourse blog.

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

On a scale of 1 to "apprenticed my babysitting charge to a pirate," how bad is your auditory processing?

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

wait guys. reblog this and tell me what the last movie you watched was. bonus points if you add a short review <333

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

Any recs for rap songs that make you feel like Luke Cage about to turn some bad guy's hangout into a heap of popsicle sticks?

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

Would Sinners lend itself to a Silver John crossover?

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

I knew Blues Brothers had a lot of music in it, but I didn't know it was a *musical*-musical, with spontaneous song-and-dance numbers and such. I also didn't expect it to have my favorite autism+adhd sibling team since Gravity Falls.

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

I think my biggest "caring about what strangers on the internet think of me" areas are that I don't want to look stubbornly stupid (looking stupid at some point is inevitable but I don't want to seem like the kind of person who doubles down on it) and that I don't want people to think badly of me because of a misapprehension. (Either in the sense of wildly misunderstanding something I did say, confusing me with someone else, or just plain making stuff up.)

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

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