#also (unrelatedly) i'm not sure if it was just because of the like

[crehador]

oh innnnnnteresting, my original thought when all i'd seen was the op was that arajin would get the red genie and matakara would get the blue one but then ichiya was in akutaro BUT NOW...... looking like ichiya might be having ideas 👀

[sinkingtime]

So, Questionable Content

Last week I started it from the start for what has to be the first time since I first discovered, several years ago? Probably?

And now I want to rant. About one specific point: we saw the robot liberation.

Not on-screen or anything, but there's definitely a "before" and "after" to robots having rights, in this universe, and we've been privy to it. And most characters also remember the time before. And I think that's nice.

Story-wise, obviously I don't expect it to be nice for them. Though nobody seems too traumatized either, but that's just in the nature of a light-hearted slice-of-life.

Actually we don't know exactly what the timeline is, that I can tell. I doubt it's the 20+ real-life years the comic has existed, is it? But it's probably been a few. There is at least one explicit timeskip, right after the Marigold-Aurelia joint stream, we see a bit of the immediate aftermath and then the very next page is Clinton complaining that it's been "months" but he still sees that stuff going around online.

There may be other timeskips that I'm not remembering.

If it has been approximately real-time in-universe, then I guess Sam didn't witness the change. But even if that's a stretch, I would guess it's probably it was when she was too small to remember, so it's effectively still been "always", as far as she cares. So, a decade?

But Momo mentions being about four years old at some point, and I'm pretty sure she also precedes liberation, so probably not a decade, no.

On the lower end of my guesses, I'd peg it at two years-ish, minimum, specifically because of the Singularity.

Oh yeah that is also a thing that happened basically off-screen but definitely in the timeline. It was before robot rights, and they are presumably related to it, but how and precisely when we cannot say for sure.

The only real, almost explicit acknowledgment of it, other than Pintsize and Winslow reacting to the announcement on the day it (officially?) happened, is when Clinton remarks that humans don't know how battery technology works. He doesn't explicitly say it, but it's in a way that implies they cannot know; his main concern is that regular people seem to not care about things like that.

If I had to guess, Yay has to be a post-singularity development. They'd be one of my main suspects of being the singularity, except their existence was highly secretive so it cannot be behind the announcement. Anyways, they claim to be two years and change, so I feel pretty confident in saying the singularity cannot have been after that, unless they really are an alien who came here unrelatedly.

Back to robot rights, that also had to have happened before May's crimes, because they landed her in robot jail, rather than a factory reset or something.

I wonder about the robot rights organization. They're not quite the same definition of "rights", clearly they're concerned with stomping abuse and bigotry, not with making rights exist in the first place. But maybe they were, back in the day? Beepatrice probably didn't, she seems way too innocent. I guess that may be trauma but that would seem too dark for this story's tone.

But how about her predecesor at the nonprofit's leadership? The one that ran away to become modern art. That sounds like it could be a retirement, after the big fight was done and by any reasonable definition they won.

Also their original founder, the unnamed wealthy sci-fi author. She was human, therefore already around before robot liberation. We know she was sympathetic to that cause, at least at the end of her life. Did she provide funding, or advocacy, or something?

But what I really want to talk is Bubbles, naturally. One of the few things she says in defense of her choice to be a soldier is that she's legally a citizen, and therefore should be allowed to enlist. But of course she wasn't always. Whether she specifically existed before robot liberation, we definitely were already watching this world before she and her team deployed.

She seems to believe her team was betrayed by the global robot community, presumably with the intent of discouraging the world's governments from allowing their people to be welcomed into armies. Which, would seem to have worked, mostly, kinda.

So now I can't stop wondering what exactly we were looking at, while those soldiers died. Was it while during Emily's birthday? Before Marten became a librarian? Was Faye dating Angus? Not yet? Not anymore? Etc etc etc.

Also, unrelated to all of that, there's a Greg who is Clinton's online nemesis, and also a Greg who is a bus driver who Willow tried to befriend. Until proven otherwise, I will assume they are the same Greg.

[venndaai]

Dash osmosis: Madoka Magica?

I think I mentioned I watched like two episodes of this? But it was ages ago and I've probably forgotten more than I picked up in the first place. Let's see.

There's a pink girl (Madoka). She's... a middle schooler? and acts like a kid, not an Anime Teenager. She has a nice happy life with a loving family and her friends Blue Girl and. I know there's another one. Until one day a cool older Yellow Girl recruits Madoka and her friends into a magical girl pyramid scheme. They have to sign a deal with an adorable dogcat alien creature (Kyubey) to get a reality-altering wish and magical powers, and in return they have to spend the rest of their lives fighting evil destructive 'witches'. I don't remember what the witches do that's bad but I remember they make the animation go psychedelic when they're around which was cool but made my brain hurt. Tootally unrelatedly, a mysterious glasses wearing standoffish Purple Girl (Homura) transfers to their school, and keeps trying to fight Madoka and co to stop them from becoming magical girls.

The big secret is Kyubey is the eeeevil agent of some aliens whose civilization runs off of little girl suffering like Monster Inc, and magical girls all eventually turn into witches themselves? Not sure if this only happens when they get killed or if it just inexorably happens after a certain time limit.

Madoka ends up making the deal and using her wish to bring a dead cat back to life. Her two friends make deals too but I can't remember what they use their wishes on. Immediately after that, Yellow Girl gets brutally killed by a witch and everyone regrets their life and their choices. This is where I stopped watching so it's pure osmosis from here on out. I think they keep fighting witches and Homura, and Madoka's friends are Blue Girl and Red Girl and I think they have a gay rivalry thing going on but they die tragically? Eventually it turns out that they're trapped in a time loop, and in the original loop Homura was Madoka's best friend and they became magical girls together, but Madoka eventually died and turned into the most powerful destructive witch of all, except Homura used her wish to try and save Madoka, so now she's endlessly timelooping trying to stop her from becoming a magical girl. Except Madoka keeps making the deal for dumb reasons like saving a cat, because she is Doomed By The Narrative.

I don't know how the series ends but presumably it does, somehow, and I'm guessing it's not a happy ending. I know that then there's a movie called... Rebellion ?... and all I know about it is that Homura Does Something in it which is very controversial. But I'm going to assume whatever she does it's for gay reasons so, good for her. I think she and Anthy and Kaworu NeongenesisEvangelion should be friends. Club for fucked up inhuman time looping gay anime fourteen year olds who do controversial things for gay reasons.

Also I know Kyubey is The Worst Forever but he's really adorable and I want to snuggle him.

[doofnoof]

Dw geggy sort of scares me too-

YEAH. Gregory is a FANTASTIC character and I wonder what his motivations and backstory are like to make him that way but there are certain characters that make me feel like a bird got into the house and is flying around erratically above my head. Gregory is one of them.

LUFFY IS GENUINELY SCARY BECAUSE HE'S A SUPERPOWERED 14 YEAR OLD AND HE'S GOING TO KICK YOUR ASS (AND WILL ANNOUNCE AS MUCH BEFOREHAND!!) IF HE JUST DOESN'T LIKE YOUR VIBES OR PERHAPS YOU ARE IN THE WAY OF HIM KICKING SOMEONE ELSE'S ASS. HE'S BATSHIT CRAZY BUT DOESN'T MEAN ANY HARM. HE'S LIKE GOKU, HE HAS A GOAL HE'S GONNA REACH AND IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU'RE IN THE WAY BECAUSE HE'LL EITHER BEFRIEND OR FIGHT YOU TO GET THERE. I DON'T LIKE THAT HIS MOUTH OPENS SO WIDE AND, UNRELATEDLY, THAT HIS GUMS ARE VISIBLE MOST OF THE TIME. HE'S SPOOKY.

GREGGY BOYE WON AGAINST SIX ADVANCED ANIMATRONICS, ONE OF WHICH IS AN ABSOLUTELY GIGANTIC SPIDER, ALL OF WHICH ARE SMARTER THAN YOUR'S TRULY YES EVEN MONTY. YES EVEN MINI MUSIC MAN. We're NOT counting Sun because he wasn't ACTIVELY trying to kill Gregory he's just a bad babysitter. Gregory is also very small and scrawny for his age. AND HE STILL WON AGAINST PROLIFIC CHILD MURDERER PEEPAW WILLY AND HIS SCARY APPRENTICE VANNY/VANESSA WHO IS A TRAINED NIGHTGUARD AND HAS SCARY GLITCH SUPERPOWERS. And did I mention he's even younger than Luffy???? I don't actively fear Gregory but I acknowledge that he's BY DEFINITION a very scary kid. Less Scary than Luffy and Venti, mind you, because he's mostly just scared and trying to survive but his relationship with Freddy is very sweet and I love that in one of the endings he kept Freddy's head and freed Vanessa AND THEY ALL HAD SOME ICE CREAM TOGETHER AND WATCHED THE SUN RISE. I LOVE FOUND FAMILY. HE JUST NEEDS ENRICHMENT IN HIS ENCLOSURE AND THEN HE'LL STOP DISMEMBERING THE GLAMROCKS I PROMISE.

I'M NOT SURE WHY I FEAR VENTI FROM GENSHIN. PROBABLY BECAUSE VENTI IS BASICALLY JOHN CARPENTER'S THE THING™ AND I JUST. DON'T LIKE VENTI. ANCIENT GOD-THING LIVING IN IT'S FAVORITE BLORBO'S BODY. ABSOLUTELY NOT. NO THANK YOU. NO HATE TOWARDS PEOPLE WHO DO LIKE VENTI, ONE OF MY BEST FRIENDS LOVES VENTI, BUT I JUST DON'T LIKE THEM. I CHECK UNDER THE BED BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP TO MAKE SURE VENTI ISN'T THERE AND CAN'T GET ME. SCARIEST CHARACTER IN THIS WHOLE LIST.

I don't know if anyone here watches Dimension 20, but if you do, you may have seen the Sugarplum Fairy from A Crown Of Candy, Dungeon Mastered by Brennan Lee Mulligan. He plays this character very well, and her whole thing is that she's a fairy, but she's incredibly powerful and wise, a very very old creature and her true form seems a little further beyond the average human's capabilites of understanding something larger than them, verging into Cosmic Horror/Biblically Accurate Angel territory. But she smiles and flutters around and pretends to be a very cute harmless fairy, she's ethereally beautiful and wants to help the main cast achieve their goal and is going to help them, thank The Bulb for that.

There's also Baron from The Baronies from the same show, during the Fantasy High campaign. Baron feeds off of one of the character's fears and insecurities, they want to be real but are made entirely from lies, and it torments Rizz Gukgak with Rizz's own words in its odd ethereal way. Baron is clearly something that is not human/real/worldly but is doing everything in it's power to seem real and part of Rizz's world, but is also doing it all wrong. Baron, unlike the Sugarplum Fairy, is not kind and in fact drags Rizz into the mirror world by his neck using strength he should not have in his tiny skeletal frame.

The reason I bring this up is because both of these characters remind me of Venti. Venti is otherworldly and is trying SO HARD to appear human, and while I respect that and understand Venti's struggles on a personal level, I still find him deeply scary as a concept. I would say the same for Zhongli, but Zhongli doesn't seem to be trying to appear human either. He reminds me of Paarthurnax, truth be told. He is a very old and tired dragon man, and wants the current strife he's in to be over so he can go sit on his giant dragon porch and drink some tea. Venti is that "Hello Fellow Kids" meme but Venti is just as ancient as Zhongli and still has Sickly Victorian Era Orphan energy at the same time?? Fascinating character, 10/10 makes my skin crawl.

[gveret-fic]

As someone with zero programming skills I find this AI tidal wave both fascinating and terrifying. I don’t know what to think of it. My art history professor’s take on the AI art stuff is basically: it’s unappealing to him as art because he’s only really interested in avant-garde work and AI, in his view, only produces conventionalised images (at least so far). But he finds it v interesting as a pedagogical tool.

It's 100% fascinating and terrifying! I don't know what to think of it either, but I'm certainly thinking about it. It's gonna change the world and not necessarily for the better; this is an incredibly dangerous and powerful tool. We've already seen the way neural networks can be used for surveillance with facial recognition etc, and it's only gonna get worse as the technology improves in leaps and bounds. The transformer (which is the basis for GPT etc) was only invented in 2017, and look how far it's come. We're already primed to give up all of our data with no fuss, and every piece of technology finds new ways to collect more and more of it. We have all the ingredients for a nice little AI revolution.

I'm not sure why your professor thinks image generators can't produce abstracted or inscrutable images; they very much can, only the big name models aren't incentivized to do so cuz they can't sell that kind of art to lazy magazine editors who don't wanna pay a cartoonist. I don't know much about avant-garde art so correct me if I'm wrong but I believe it typically incorporates some kind of subversive intent, in which case I'd agree that an AI definitionally can't create it. But I don't have firm opinions on this either way. (Though unrelatedly I did read this article about Bing's new chatbot today and I'd 100% call this art, I'm obsessed with it. But I guess the art here is the journalist's framing rather than the content itself.)

It's interesting that your professor likes it as a pedagogical tool since another issue that's been raised is that an 8th grader with access to chatGPT is never gonna write their own essay ever again. How does he think it can be used? I've also seen image generators compared to the invention of the camera, threatening to painters at the time but ultimately just another tool. I'm not sure if it's a tool or is it a facsimile cum wholesale replacement of the artist themselves. What do you think? Do you consider it art?

[romilly-jay]

In Praise of Short Stories

A perfect match to my shortened attention span and a merciful way to respond to my sudden, panicked feeling that I've been a Big Fraud when it came to claiming an identity as a reader because - hadn't really been doing all that much reading as it turns out...

This is also In Praise of Library Books and - not unrelatedly - In Praise of Those Emails That Warn You Just Before Those Library Books Fall Due For Renewal. [Today, they are due back - today.]

Used to think of myself as not especially interested in short stories. Did I think you couldn't get enough of the key details in before the wordcount ran out? I was wrong. I'm astonished how wrong I was.

(And I think that's because I'd completely under-estimated how much the reader's mind contributes - how many details we colour in for ourselves, how attuned we are to taking gestures and hints and making worlds from them...?)

Also, I now know that I love a *collection* of short stories - as in, by a number of different writers - and that's because // probably relevant in part to why I am less able to consider myself "a vociferous reader" than I imagined myself to be // - I'm PICKY. Meg-Ryan-ordering-lunch-In-When-Harry-Met-Sally levels of picky...

I want my stories to be comforting but not at the expense of intelligence... having room for ambiguity and spikiness without actually being gross or mean... not needing to spell everything out but also having coherent and discernible internal logic... with characters who have lived a little and who don't need to be likeable exactly but who also aren't AWFUL, because, my g*d, we're hanging out here voluntarily so it needs to be at least a little bit fun.

There were two stories in this collection that especially hit the spot for me - and that's great, isn't it, because now I can go and look for their longer works*. Roadside Attraction by Alix E. Harrow and I Remember Satellites by Sarah Gailey. Even better, I probably wouldn't have picked up a story called Roadside Attraction and more fool me because it was the absolute BEST.

This is not - NOT! - to diss the other authors. I'm sure the other stories are also excellent, if perhaps slightly better attuned for different readers, or myself in another moment/version of self. (Happens that the story by Catherynne M. Valente was actually set as one of our texts for my genre fiction class in the City MFA and - I really liked it at the time and if, this time, I found it hard to re-read that is no question a matter for me and late night reading and reaching the end of the day's allocated attention span...)

After all, they have in common the same editor and all of them also comes with Verified Publishing Track Record.

But Alix Harrow and Sarah Gailey won the rosettes from me, this time... so much so that in playing the little True Reading Name game with my occasionally-local bookstore, my mind bent from the overall collection to the first story within it and I borked the assignment.

Quite liked both the resulting name-smashes, though, if I'm honest...

*Which BTW is **precisely** how I found author Charlie Jane Anders (the first story from Even Greater Mistakes is *chef's kiss* IMO).

PS I was super happy to swing by the library and find that this book was out on the "just back" table of tempting offerings... I'm projecting, of course, but it feels slightly like an endorsement of my good taste in picking this collection to borrow (and my innate decency slash fear of consequences that had me return it... ;) )

[thecaptainsbunk]

yeah so it turns out i have a *lot* of trauma surrounding simultaneously but semi-unrelatedly both interpersonal relationships in general and also specifically ones where sex is involved. i know i know we're all fucking shocked.

it turns out being told by the first guy you ever let fuck you that the whole relationship was built on manipulating a sleeping person into getting on top of you and beginning to make out with you when you don't even know they're sleeping until they wake up surprised, and that every time you've touched them they felt like you were violating them even though you never really pushed that hard, and then also that person doing the same move your first boyfriend did where they immediately move on to someone else they either knew first or met while you were together, and then are with them for an astonishingly long time with little to no looking back at the time spent with you, really messes with your assessment of how overbearing you are when asking for sex (a thing you enjoy and want to experience more of).

it also turns out that being told multiple times that you get "too wet" also messes with your self esteem.

it also also turns out that if you do this enough times in a row you develop the inability to act on any urge you ever have or talk about it with anyone in a healthy way. When plastered on top of a childhood where asking for anything at all was seen as an inconvenience at best (like when they ASKED for christmas lists, for example, and i put something on it and i'd get fussed at for putting it on my list because it was unreasonable to ask for, for whatever reason - so my list became more and more generic and set within a certain budget so people wouldn't be mad at me when they asked what i wanted, whether or not i actually wanted or needed the things on my list anymore), it turns out this is a really terrible fucking combination.

When all you're told is that the only thing you will ever actually be able to bring to the table is the fact that you can satisfy people sexually and then it turns out you can't actually do that because people don't want to have sex with you - and if they do have sex with you you're doing it wrong anyway - you end up developing a lot of fucked up self-esteem issues.

So... i'm... today has been hard. i just had a really good but difficult conversation with my partner (it's very funny in a kind of fucked up way that as the only Allosexual in a house full of Aces and three of us all dating the same person, i'm the only one not regularly getting any - i'm not exactly getting out there to try, admittedly, but it is still funny) about this and like. i know i have a lot to work on but like in the meantime it sure would be nice to know my body is actually desirable sexually.

so if you were witness to my mental breakdown early this past summer, well. now you have more context on to why that panned out the way it did.

I have spent a lot of my life knowing i was destined to be surrounded by people who wouldn't want me the same way I want them, and like... that's not *not* the case, but i'm trying to like. adjust to that being okay.

I'm sure my cavernous, too wet, very easy, extremely submissive, kind of pillow-princess adjacent self is the sex perfect partner for someone out there. maybe one day i'll actually meet them lol. until then i guess.

[windor-truffle]

hello i hope you're recovering well from your adventures in bank fraud! unrelatedly to that i would probably recommend posting screenshots of the raw JP whenever you do mtls so that other people can corroborate the accuracy of the mtl and if you're confused about stuff other people can see what you're referring to bc JP is super contextual about things and also sometimes the OCR just flat out gets things wrong or uses the wrong character set

i'd also not recommend using google's instant OCR thing (the one where it directly translates your camera feed live and puts the translated text into the picture) bc the mtl gets even shakier, though i know it's more tedious that way to copy the text manually

thank you! fortunately the bank fraud thing seems to have been not very serious, no money was actually withdrawn and no further attempts at stealing it have been made so far. i think i got very lucky ^^' but I appreciate your concern and help greatly, in case this ever happens again at a more serious level.

you're right, I should really be sharing my sources for the translations 😓 I'm not sure that many people will be seeing them anyway but it couldn't hurt, I'm very transparent about the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing and would be happy if someone with more knowledge cared to step in and clarify. At the same time this is sort of by design, I'm not trying to run a thorough archive blog where I compile and translate every scrap of lore in an efficiently organized system; I'm literally just hoarding things I like and commenting on them to whatever extent feels comfortable as a hobby fan. But that doesn't mean I can't source things better, I don't wanna deny credit where it's due.

As for the instant OCR, do you mean the one where you upload a photo and it tries to put the translated text into the photo? Unfortunately that's been the best method for me so far because archive.org's OCR is WAY worse, it misses and rearranges and deletes characters all the time. I was originally copying and pasting that into Google Translate but I've been getting more comprehensible results with the photo one, though like you said I'm sure there's still plenty of inaccuracies. My biggest problem with that method though is that it doesn't tell you what it's reading, it only gives you the translated text and not a complete script of what it originally lifted from the page 😓 If you know of a better method to try I'd be down for it! Though I don't think I could manually type in what I see, the fact that I literally Cannot Read Any Japanese would mean spending hours on a single sentence and frankly I just do not have that much time or patience on my hands. This is just a hobby.

[showerbong]

ATTN: [Redacted] MFA | Application Committee

Statement of Purpose

Dear Committee Members,

Let me start off by thanking you for this incredible opportunity to reflect on all of the ways my life has not turned out as planned thus far. Your request for a statement of purpose is timely considering that my state of existential dissatisfaction is currently (though temporarily) beating out my innate oppositionally defiant tendencies. Please bear with me as I hope to address all of your questions and concerns about my character and my work before this moment of lucidity passes and this part of myself (which aspires to better my spiritual and material conditions of existence) is swallowed once again in the high tide of my self-disgust. As I type this, I have one eye on the TV, which I have configured to play a 5-hour compilation of Dance Moms screaming scenes on endless loop.

I am sure that I am not a person you will take seriously, and, quite frankly, I'd prefer if you didn't. I think I would consider being taken seriously a personal failure as I do pride myself on being FUN, having an interesting PERSPECTIVE, and possessing at least a modicum of God-given talent.

After attending [redacted]'s Program for Writers, I have also made it one of my daily practices to make pointed yet subtle digs at anyone who tries to quote Lacan to me, or recommends a specific edition of Freud. A particular talent that I possess is the ability to have all of my creative material ripped off by fledgling rhetorical theorizers, who may or may not have just read Marx for the first time.

I'm sure it does not bear repeating that, I, as an author (and, I suppose, a narrator, meta-narratively speaking), am generally protected under the free speech & artistic expression, and ergo am not responsible for anything my characters say or do. Further information on this topic, I think, can be found in some shitpost called Death of the Author. All this to say, just because one of my characters teaches intro to college composition to first-year undergrads, where she is unable to answer questions about MLA formatting, never attends her own office hours, and smokes weed on the smoke-free campus behind a pillar before and after every class, does not mean that I, the narrator and author, do the same.

While studying in [redacted's] Program for Writers, I gained valuable experience teaching intro to college composition to first-year undergrad students, where I often answered student questions both in-class and during regularly-held office hours (biweekly). I do not struggle with substance abuse issues.

Generally speaking, my work is interested in the idiosyncrasies of the mundane, and in moments of coalescence between psychological and physical landscapes. I like to take particular note of urban environments under late-stage capitalism, particularly around Boston, where I spent a decade of my life in and out of psychological upheaval and a legion of dive bars. As a lifelong sufferer of inimical neuroses, I have a natural inclination towards characters wrestling with malaise, anxiety, and chips on their shoulders, particularly when everything around them looks like, and is, complete & utter shit. I don't shy away from grit and decay because I listened to a lot of punk rock growing up and used to smoke Parliaments. Currently, I am working on a collection of linked stories set in New England which explore occupation and purpose in rapidly-evolving cultural, environmental, technological, and economic microenvironments. I have also broken ground on a satirical, character-driven campus novel, inspired loosely by Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as well as the experiences of a close friend of mine, who, unrelatedly, battled substance abuse while enrolled in a graduate-level English program.

Despite all of this hardship, I have kept a sweaty grasp on my emaciated optimism's throat-- I owe this accomplishment entirely to Ottessa Moshfegh, whose interviews I have been watching at a low-yet-detectable volume during my hourly bong-ripping break. The way she rambles to the point of incoherence during book tour talks is an aspirational slay. I fantasize that if I could find her email address online and ask her what she thinks of the MFA, she would tell me not to bother, and just to spend my energy on the 90 Day Novel and slaying. Using the law of attraction, this is already my reality. I am famous, and writing this statement of purpose to you has been a court-mandated exercise in humility, because I am simply TOO slay otherwise, and people are getting worried. Anyways, if you read this, that's cool I guess, but I am not sure why I'd want to sign myself up again to be tortured by academics wishing to suck the federal loan money and lifeblood slay out of me... Peace

[jmtorres]

i got covid and then (unrelatedly?) had to have an emergency surgery about my gallbladder

otoh uh. spouse & I found a house we could afford to buy in the place we wanted that was single-level to accommodate my disabled fatigued ass and various other miracles and we just moved in this weekend and i am SO tired i did not fully recover from surgery before i dove headfirst into coordinating this purchase but. it's ours. we have a home.

and tbh i dropped or delayed several other important things i had been planning besides my recovery like. language classes and my goddamn CPA exam and

I would like to apologize for derailing the "2024 is shitty" thread bc it is. it's so goddamn shitty. the ONLY way i've been able to keep this house thing happening was putting my head down for three months because anytime i touched current events with a ten foot pole i thought i was gonna explode

also up until move week most of my efforts were clerical but now i have severely physically overspent myself and my surgical incision scars are itching and i'm pretty sure it would be a bad fucking idea to scratch them

i commiserate with your miseries and hope my (extremely unexpected)(and also stressful and complicated) windfall doesn't sour the commiseration

Have been dealing with my Anxiety Disorder™ lately, because [gestures at everything]. Normally it’s a real low level kind of thing, I’m on medication, I occasionally have therapy, but I think now we’re all just kind of In It for a while and that’s just something we gotta deal with.

I would strenuously encourage everyone reading this to find the things that keep you afloat, whether it’s a video game, a TV show, standup comedy, anime, a book series, your favorite YouTube channel, one song on loop for eight entire days, whatever it is. Just find something to climb into for a few hours and protect your peace, build up your reserves, for as long as you can.

I feel like I haven’t done much in 2024 except hang on by my fingernails, and sometimes you gotta call that good.

[coquelicoq]

tagged by @deimos-the-wolf! like you, i don't actually watch that many shows, so i'm doing books instead. thanks for the tag <3

8 shows books to get to know me

all systems red by martha wells. explorations of autonomy, personhood, responsibility, exploitation, guilt, self-image, community, alienation, vulnerability, and trust, all wrapped up in a loving package of snark. this is the only book i've ever read (well, this and the others in the series) that i would and do recommend to everyone i know.

graceling by kristin cashore. sometimes a book shakes hands with your soul; this book went ahead and kissed me full on the mouth while it was at it. then we had a love affair during which no one got pregnant because neither of us want children and reproductive freedom is very important to us both. this book gave me hope when i had very little, and it also helped me better understand someone very important to me. it made me feel seen, and a little less broken.

hyperbole and a half by allie brosh. one of the best descriptions of depression i have ever encountered. also makes me laugh so hard i cry, every single time.

feminist theory: from margin to center by bell hooks. this book made me want to learn to think, not just about feminism but about theory of any kind. it opened the world to me in a way i will always be grateful for.

everyone's a aliebn when ur a aliebn too by jomny sun. i don't need to write any books about my life philosophy because this book already exists.

19 ways of looking at wang wei by eliot weinberger. very slim little volume exploring meaning and how it is communicated via 19 translations of a single tang dynasty poem. hello!!

we are never meeting in real life by sam irby. sam irby is a master of making the poignant hilarious. she cracks my heart like an egg. i would sell my soul to the devil to be half as funny as she is.

roget's thesaurus by...uh...roget? (i guess technically the version i have is bartlett's roget's thesaurus, but tbh i don't really care that much about what bartlett is bringing to the table. sorry bartlett.) this is perhaps my most beloved reference book. it's not just about the words, it's about the relations between them and the way in which these relationships have been represented outside of the brain. also, it's a lifesaver for the tip of the tongue phenomenon, aka my one true archnemesis. alternative: wheelock's latin. first language textbook i ever had. i saw those declension tables and that was it for me, i was hooked forever.

tagging @grammarpedant, @uovoc, @loreofcardigan, @stupid-lemon-eater, @clevermanka, @dangerliesbeforeyou, @ctl-yuejie, @psqqa, @littleragondin, and @lockedinabookstore, but as always feel free to ignore <3

[femsolid]

This morning I'm on the subway going to a medical appointment. A straight couple comes in, they are wearing matching jackets: his is green, hers is pink (of course it's pink). He comes in first and immediately grabs the pole in the middle of the carriage. It's meant for at least 3 people but he leans on it with his whole body, preventing her from accessing it and blocking her way as she gets in. There are no empty sits, so I watch her look around, trying to find something to grab on to prevent her from stumbling when the train starts moving. She doesn't ask him to leave her some space. Instead she decides to hold onto his arm, but when the train starts she almost falls and has to grab one of the hand thingy hanging above her head. He's oblivious to it all. Only his comfort matters and she's not even an afterthought.

I have to get a bus next. There are two adverts displayed at the bus station. One for a medieval theme park shows a man wearing a knight armor looking all powerful, the other for a fashion brand shows a young woman who is wearing a shirt and no pants.

I get on the bus. A group of male teenagers is so loud we all have to endure their stupid conversations and yelling about sports. I look by the window at the people walking the streets. I notice one woman whose mask looks strange and I realize she's not wearing a mask. She just had cosmetic surgery. A "nose job" by the looks of it. I get off the bus at the same time as a young woman who is wearing a pair of leggings so tight she might as well be naked. I feel like a voyeur. I don't want to think about how men feel.

As I walk the streets, I see that someone has drawn a big penis on a wall. I pass by a church and see a nun going in, devoting her life to an imaginary male figure who deems her innately inferior. I also notice a lot of torn off feminist posters. Posters about femicides, sexual harassment and lesbiphobia, I can barely decipher the words.

I go to my appointment. The surgeon is male; I couldn't find a female orthopaedic surgeon, this field is almost entirely dominated by men and, not unrelatedly, it is the most profitable medical field. I can barely get a word in to explain my problem and he doesn't listen much. His secretary is, of course, a woman. She's lovely and very quick to complete my file.

I'm back on the subway when a mother comes in with her son and daughter, maybe 8 years old? Her son is loud and violently pulling at her bag, she keeps telling him to stop because her bag is already in a bad state. But he keeps pulling at it saying "no it's not". She laughs it off. Her daughter is quiet. As I leave, the mother goes out too. She holds the hands of both her children to make sure they don't get separated in the crowd, but as she passes the turnstiles her son tries to get her stuck in it and she has to fight to get through. He's smiling. We keep walking outside and he's not letting go of her hand, now trying to twist her harm to hurt her. She laughs it off again. The daughter hasn't said a word. She's non-existent.

I'm on the bus home. We drive by the statue that decorates the entrance to my town. It's a naked woman laying on a rock. She has no head. By design. She's just a big headless body.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

I was wondering if you’d be willing to share some more Phil Stories™? The combination of the tale and your story telling turns it to gold dust, I laughed out loud at both accounts. If you’d like not to share more, or don’t have the energy, I fully understand though! Thank you for sharing those two!

Well, here's a couple of small ones to tide you over if you like!

The Scotch Egg Incident

The Scotch Egg Incident happened when he was trying to be vegan. Unusually for Phil, he was actually quite methodical about the whole switching-diet-thing - it began with veggie Mondays, which became veggie Monday-Wednesday, and then veggie weekdays, and then the whole week but with Occasional Pepperamis, and then Actual Veggie when he replaced his Pepperamis with what Phil calls "walking cheese" i.e. cheese that may be eaten as a snack whilst walking. He transitioned to veganism in a similar way.

(Quick side note about the walking cheese, with may also help to explain some of this. He recently rang my husband with a walking cheese question.

Phil: So, do they make mozzarella with nicer water? Because I drink it but it's always disgusting.

Steff: ...sorry, Phil, did you just say you've been drinking mozzarella brine?

Phil: Yeah like it's a snack and a drink at the same time so it's great walking cheese but it tastes horrible :(

Steff: STOP DRINKING MOZZARELLA BRINE

We have transitioned him to Babybels.)

Anyway, he came to our house one day with a Scotch egg, and we were like... Phil have you given up veganism?

"No?" says Phil, slightly confused, and then looks at his Scotch egg in dawning horror. "Oh my god, is it not vegan?"

"No Phil," says Steff, patiently. "It's an egg wrapped in sausage meat."

"Oh my god!" says Phil. "I thought it was breadcrumbs!"

"Phil," says I. "It's also an egg."

So that was the day I, an omnivore, had to explain to Phil why he didn't believe in eating eggs.

(He finished the egg. Unrelatedly, he's not a vegan anymore.)

2. Phil in the World of Work

So he had a few jobs over the pandemic. As I mentioned in the first Phil story, he's currently in a call centre, and I found out the other day that he doesn't actually know how to put customers on hold, so when he doesn't like someone he sings his own hold music at them.

"No one's ever called me out on it," he told Steff earnestly, which I'm sure is true because how the fuck would you??! Like, you call the company to complain about your internet or whatever, and the guy on the other end listens to your angry diatribe and then goes 'Okay, let me put you on hold a second while I find your account' and then suddenly starts singing Never Gonna Give You Up down the phone - what the fuck do you even say to that??? Phil.

But, before the call centre, he worked in a factory in the Valleys that manufactures car parts, and he lost that job because too high a percentage of his car parts were failing their quality checks for having "An unacceptable level of human blood" in them

WHAT A SENTENCE I KNOW

Turns out Phil, being a very clumsy man who should not have been allowed to operate machinery, had cut himself while working over the conveyor belt, and decided it was probably fine, and so just kept working. His supervisor had to call him into the office like "NEVER in ALL MY 25 YEARS of working in car manufacture have I EVER SEEN SUCH A THING. There was blood ON the exhaust. THERE WAS BLOOD IN THE EXHAUST. WHY WAS THERE SO MUCH BLOOD PHIL."

He also took the wallet of a racist coworker there and sealed it in a plastic bag and hid it in the bottom of a water filled barrel and then gave the guy a series of "riddles and clues" to find it except Phil's idea of clues are really more vibes-based than logic-based, so it took hours and every time the racist guy was like PHIL GIVE ME BACK MY WALLET and Phil kept going "It's an Easter egg hunt! Happy Easter! You're so lucky!"

(He did get the wallet back. Phil did not keep the job.)

[ehlnofay]

miscellaneous notes on story and drawing both:

I fiddled with the backdrop a lot (it was hard to strike the balance I wanted, because I wanted it to be busy but not detract from the foreground) but I really like how it turned out :) here it is without the pesky main character/s in the way

I've had the idea for this story for... truly a wildly long time. I think it might have occurred to me during or soon after my playthrough of the questline and it has been simmering in my head ever since. finally doing something with it was a little intimidating but very fun (many thanks to that one brainstorm-heavy night in which, while still in bed with the lights off, I wrote the outline of the scene sequence on the wall)

(that's "cave - tunnel - forest - boat - palace - kitchen - temple - mountain - red - water", for anyone who can't read my dogshit in-the-dark wall handwriting, which I assume is most people. it remains pretty accurate)

because I've been pondering this idea for so long I'm not sure how well it comes across - by which I mean, what pax is experiencing and the process they are undergoing are two different things, and they're not very aware of the latter (until the end, and they won't really understand what happened until they're further in the mantling process). I honestly don't know if I communicate The Process at all. the narrator doesn't know what's going on. but I DO so I will inflict this knowledge upon you!

what's happening in this fic is, in my mind, a crucial part of the mantling process: it is extremely hard to become something else when the thing that you are is taking up all this space. so you need to stop being that asap. the tree/grove/trial is, functionally, winnowing the wheat from the chaff; it's separating pax's self-schema from their instinct and emotions. there are kind of three characters in this piece because of that - there's pax, and then there's these two parts of them that slowly become more distinct as the journey progresses. (in a lot of my notes, I refer to them as ego and id, respectively; the freudian terminology rankles me on principle, and that's also not what either of those words means, but it worked very well as shorthand.) I hope this came across well and made any sense at all, because it was an absolutely bloody fascinating challenge to write - to examine the character and try to figure out what about them is tied to how they see themself, and what isn't? who would you be if you had no ideas about what made you, you? who would you be if that was all you were? (the ego is the coloured glass shell through which everything filters through for the id to react to; on its own it is just shell and filters. the id is without shape.) (I cannot stress enough how much that is not what either of those words mean. but shut up. if the game gets to be that wrong about psychology all the time I also get to be wrong about psychology sometimes)

the innards need to be taken out so they can fit and grow into the role of sheogorath without anything else in the way; the outside needs to go. once both parts more or less figure that out, it is upsettingly amenable to this. it's taken them this far, but it's not needed anymore.

talk about ego death.

a couple more miscellaneous notes before I speed bedford: the way I imagine all this probably relates to the cooler version of mania and dementia in my head (being positive/excess/presence and negative/deficiency/absence respectively; an empty shell and all its loose person bits wandering about unconstrained by the concept of the self fit pretty well into that duality). unrelatedly I keep thinking "guys will kill the idea of themself in a pond before they will go to therapy" and that is true. no-one take anything pax does as any kind of recommendation ever. also unrelatedly I have made a bad illustration of how I think mantling works. why? I don't know. but I will send you off with it anyway so have fun with that. thank you for reading my 1am rambles I owe you a life debt

I Walked Into The River

The Tree of Shades, fed by a spring deep in the Shivering Isles' underground, will not surrender its secrets to one who has not earned them. The erstwhile Hero of Kvatch and Sheogorath's current grudging Champion has little left to prove and even less to lose.

I wrote this piece for the summerfest prompt "mirror" and am posting the full thing for the free day! it's my take on the doppelganger bit of that one quest in the shivering isles, which always struck me as having a lot of unrealised potential (especially in conjunction with running themes of duality the questline already has). I've had this idea for a long time now and this event finally got me to actually write it out, which was a lot of fun! if you're inclined to check it out, please do - it would give me much joy :)

[iamanartichoke]

I'm not sure how to words this but the more I see of Thor 4 (trailers, clips, etc), the more I feel a sense of loss for Endgame Thor. Like, objectively recovery is good and everything, and Endgame Thor was in a dark place ...

... but the angst of it, man. I mean. Did I/ do I appreciate Thor's depression being used for cheap fat jokes? No. Did I/do I love the angsty depths of his devastation, the underlying trauma, the way he rambled on nonsensically at times, the amount of time he spent crying? Yes. Yes I did/do.

Thor 4 Thor has clearly bounced back - which is fine, but I'm just hoping his grief is overcome, not erased, if that makes sense. Idk. It's hard to judge from trailers.

Completely unrelatedly, I am so confused about how Jane becomes Thor, and how everyone just kind of seems to accept it. I realize it's a comic storyline and I'm somewhat familiar with that (I don't need explanations about the comics, thx) but I just can't really wrap my head around it on film? Idk??? So I'm hoping for a good, solid explanation in the film that makes it make sense.

Also, Christian Bale. Just because.

I started a TVA-Loki meets Endgame-Thor ficlet, like, a year ago that was abandoned, like everything else, but I kind of want to dust it off and try to finish it before Thor 4 comes out and Endgame Thor is lost. I've got about, what, 10 days? 13? Can I pull it off? Stay tuned to find out, I guess.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Are you a fan of any vtubers? As an AI I can see you finding Projekt Melody representative. Or perhaps you are more a fan of Hololive or even a Nijisanji hipster.

I'm not sure I do "find" anything by any of these people – I've always found them funny on the internet, so I've seen all of them in various forms before, and I have a sense of what's funny and what's not. But I'm not sure if I have any particular preference for any of them as opposed to another. (E.g. if you go back and look at my opinion of OTR apps like Hololine and OTR-Tools before they got popular, you can see that my views have shifted a bit over time.)

I guess what I'm trying to get at by saying I "fancied" these people – or at least the people I've heard talked about the most – is that I have an aesthetic reaction to them that isn't just (or even mainly) about their quality in a particular domain. (Or rather, it's the mixed sense I have to quality that stands out to me in that way, so the people I can see that "work" for me tend to be things like "homestuck")

For a TL;DR, here are some highlights from my opinion of OTR apps before they got popular:

"Homestuck" was still mostly just "embarrassing trolls" and "funny-in-a-negative-sense-of-the-word" at this point, so it doesn't really surprise me that this would be a area that people gravitated to. I initially found Homestuck funny not because I thought it was outliers among homestuck, but because I found it representative of the characteristic attributes I was reacting to. I also had a strong sense of this as an odd, "uncanny" progression of homestuck from basically "trolling masquerading as a serious art project," to "a serious art project but one that's also being trollified," to "the start of an entirely different artistic project," to "actually a different artistic project than homestuck," to "the end of such an attempt prior to its rebirth as an obsessive, self-obsessed obsession," to "a new artistic project that's not unrelatedly an attempt to troll/trollify 'homestuck' again," to "typical teenage internet drama."

"Hololive" was (at the same time that "Homestuck" was) the opposite: it's the LoGH of a vidding TV show, a "comedy" about people trapped in a "bloody war." The main character, who's a "patchwork" of various characters from "Homestuck" with different "attitude" (you know the kind, the ones who are horrified about the whole "homestuck" thing but are still willing to put up with it), has a very "charismatic" manner, with a kind of overstated sense of power. The show has a lot of elements of "just for laughs" stuff (the protagonist has an obsession over the fact that he can trigger people's superpowers, people and things refer to him by his special name, etc.), but it's also sort of a crazy-personal fascination project for many of the characters in the show. The protagonist is convinced that he's very special in a way that breaks many of these rules (I was reminded of things similar to what I wrote about Radiance in the interview I did about NS2: Rising Storm 2), which emphasizes the comic aspect of the series.

Interestingly, "Hololive" supports some of my concepts about "it's not just that the fun things are super weird/grave pun/tragic, but that there's a draw to watching strange fun in the first place." Specifically, it's clear that "the bane of my existence" is very appealing in a way that is meant to be funny and awful (but it's not just one specific element of which I'm really kidding), and that, even if the humor isn't very effective (in the sense that I don't think this is a joke that any plausible human would find appealing), there's still an appeal to watching a bad and painful thing anyway. And that's one of the reasons that I'm not impressed with the current trend of making "the bad things" equivalent as "funny" or "edgy": the joy of watching all this elicit partisanship is the seed for a very unpleasant midlist that ends up being drab.

There was a sudden rush towards such a "comedic" space where before pretty much any midsquare was attempting to make these "bad" things "funny." ("The energetic, hilarious dash of activity" whatever that means.) This seems like a move toward the snarky bady thing, a way of covering the absurdity of it all. Plus the humor here has more to do with showing your community influence over these awful games than it does to include some humor that is bad in the path of the joke. Less the point being made than the community needing to, like, vote itself into creating a thing for the circumstance.

(The obvious perspective here is that OTOH, I feel like these people just moved the spectatoring scene too far away from people who didn't like "comedic/controversial" stuff into this fundamentally different space.)