#i think i'm gonna save for a juicer

[frogbi]

Actually came here to say i love carrot juice with all my heart

[tunashei]

First impressions of Animorphs!

I'm listening to the Animorphs series while I work, through Animorphs Aloud - a fan made reading of the series. Here are my first impressions/random thoughts about them! Spoilers below if you haven't read them.

Book 5: The Predator

Alright we've got Marco POV. I was dreading this one cause I find him a bit whiny and annoying, but I'm actually quite into it! I think seeing his internal thoughts and worries really helps deepen the character.

My suspension of belief is being tested by the idea of punks dumb enough to try and fight a gorilla.

Ok so if you get hurt and then morph, you lose the damage. But what if you have something stuck in you? Like a bullet.

<I am well. And each of you?> Idk why but I love this line. Polite boy. <3

Ax u fucking numpty where the hell are you going. I was not expecting him to be this...air-headed. And of all the foods for him to try first he got COFFEE?! Not gonna end well. Though is an interesting thought, if you could introduce food to someone who'd never eaten before, what would you pick?

---------

“Must I carry this?” he asked, indicating his empty coffee cup.

“No, you can just throw it away.”

Bad choice of words. Ax threw the coffee cup. He threw it hard.

---------

^ This made me laugh out loud at work

Ok so I guess staying undercover is just straight out of the equation now. How are you going to cover up Ax morphing from human to Andalite when he did it in a crowded mall? And then this poor lady watching her lobsters turn into humans/ an alien.

Confirmed can't morph from one animal to another. I thought Jake had done it in book 2 from flea to tiger but turns out I misheard and he did go back to human in between..

The ants lacking the idea of self leading to the group forgetting themselves is legitimately creepy. Imagine if they hadn't regained control, and Tobias watches his friends turn into ants and walk off and they're gone forever...

Put being ripped apart by ants on my list of ways I do not wanna die

Being that this is book 5/54 somehow I doubt this will be Marco's last mission, but considering how against it he's been and the recent traumatising I'm curious what will pull him back. Hoping it will be something that puts the 'should we/shouldn't we' plot point to bed.

You know I really want to know HOW Visser Three got the Andalite body, hope we get to learn that backstory sometime.

AAAAAAAAAAAA Visser One reveal holy shiiit. I KNEW Marco's mom would come back up, but I didn't put the pieces together with Visser One. Haha. Brilliant. I guess this is how we'll be keeping Marco on board.

Oh man the thoughtspeak between Marco and Jake, the only other one to realise. It makes Marcos comments on Tom being a controller in the first books so much juicer. Now you guys have this in common.

Not really sure why Visser Three didn't just kill them then and there

They're in a hurry so can't really blame em but man it would have been good if they could have acquired a Hork-Bajir from the unconscious ones

One thing I appreciate in animorphs is how so far, most of their missions have been failures. This book is probably the biggest failure, they potentially blew their cover with Ax in the mall, got almost killed twice, failed to capture a spaceship and got saved by a Yeerk. I really enjoyed it though, I like Marco a lot more now, I think the big reveal is gonna be great for his character.

[nokingsonlyfooles]

Dear Academia, I guess you can die mad about the curtains, if it bothers you that much...?

Wow, I just watched... Wow.

(I didn't really just watch it. I saved this and sat on it to see if I cooled off and decided I was being too mean. Since then, I've tripped over another essay where someone ripped into a work because they didn't understand it well enough to see the curtains at all, and I didn't like that either. I've decided to post this, so later I can post my reaction to the other one like a matching bookend!)

I made you a graphic about it!

So, I just watched my High School AP English teacher transcend time and space, possess the body of an a YouTuber, and try to drag me for quitting my English major due to being sick of dissecting the work of other writers until it dies.

Also, they put text up on the screen that I was supposed to read, over a decorative text background, and if I could pull money out of their Patreon, much like Mark Twain with the collection plate, I would've taken a nickel. For spite.

So, I guess I'm gonna talk about the blue curtains?

First of all, don't go looking for the video to drag this person. At worst, they are a little self-important and over-emotional. At best, their brain got shredded by the same process mine rejected and they are recovering. Be kind. I don't wanna hurt them, I'm trying to fire over their head. And take this with a grain of silly.

This is the meme. I couldn't find the original, uncensored version, and I don't care all that much, so here ya go.

One of YTer's friends referenced this meme, and it offended their intelligence and ability to critique art. Instead of having a more typical reaction, like thinking, "Ah, yes, you are only expressing your frustration with the school system's unreasonable expectations. As a fellow sufferer, I shall express my solidarity, and henceforth we shall share a sensible chuckle," and then chuckling sensibly, they telegraphed their offence to a slur on Art itself and wrote an essay. Of course, it is Capitalism's fault.

Now, Capitalism is most definitely tearing up the school system and inflicting lasting trauma on everyone involved and hurting Art. There is a lot of meat to be had on this bone. I would've left money in the collection plate for an engaging essay on that!

What I got was: "Art exists for you to tear it to pieces and squeeze every last instance of poetic meaning out of it, like you're hucking an orange into a juicer, and if you don't do that, you're dumb. Capitalism has made you dumb, because your dumbness is more profitable. I, on the other hand, huck Art into the juicer that is my brain, as one should, because I'm smart. The curtains are never blue. Fight the Power."

And right away, I thought: Oh, Mrs. Hillburn, I know this is how you enjoy Art. I know you really love it. You full-body crashed into a filing cabinet while explaining the Canterbury Tales to us, so I know you really do love "close reading" and want to share your joy. You're allowed to do that! God love you! But sometimes the curtains are blue.

And that wouldn't be a problem - except your job is to judge everyone on their ability, not only to interpret the curtains as something other than blue, but also to cough up a "valid" interpretation. And your judgment will affect whether they can get a job that pays them enough money to live. Now, you are free to do that. When I write things, I give them to the world! But, I'm not doing that to help you sort the children into an appropriate pay grade by demanding that they enjoy my work in the same way you do. Why would I do that? That makes no fucking sense.

I am saying this as someone writing a long-ass story that has a lot to do with objects being a certain colour and numbers adding up to a certain sum. That's there for you if you want it! Pink things are safe, orange things are hazardous, yellow means despair, and green-and-orange together is something unpleasant, because Erik doesn't like carrots and the whole world revolves around him. (Don't tell him, he'll be very upset. The world is terrible.) Do I need you to get that in order to understand my work and be "smart"? Fuck no. It's an Easter Egg. Also, it amuses me. Sometimes you need to know the number or the colour for your immersion, so I generate one in a way that has meaning for me.

There is shit in that story that I know you'll never get, because I based it off shit I wrote as a teenager that you'll never read. (It was terrible. I fixed it. I think.) This is my own personal "Glass Onion" (the song, not so much the movie). I am not obliged to imbue everything with a meaning for you to find. I'm not secretly trying to tell you Paul is dead! I'm just a human being with a sense of humour who gets bored - and sloppy and confused too.

So maybe the curtains are blue because I'm cribbing the setting off this motel room I stayed at one time and the curtains were blue. Maybe I'm saying "Hi" to my dog. Or the Blue's Clues dog. Maybe, god help us, there were actual blue curtains at the time and place I set my story and you'd see them if you found a photo. But I'm not gonna tell you if it doesn't matter. And it's not your job to make it matter if you don't get it. You can still pick up what I'm laying down. And, dammit, if you spend too much time wrapped up in the curtains, you might miss the rest of it.

There seems to be some idea that Art is hard and artists (at least #Real_Artists) must be something more than human to do it. Oh. My. God. Literally! You created this thing? Everything is there because you put it there? Everything that exists here is a thought-child you birthed from your brain like Athena? With intent? I enjoy it so much! It feels so real! How do you DO that? And, for fuck's sake, it's the same way you make a yummy sandwich or pick out a ripe melon or trim the cat's nails without getting a wound that needs stitches. You decide you want to, and you keep at it until you get good at it. You don't need to ask permission or pay a fee. The world is a classroom. Go learn. Keep trying until you figure out a way that works for you, or you decide you'd rather learn something else - and then go learn that instead.

The pedestal is very flattering, but nobody belongs up here. The very idea of a pedestal is preventing people from picking up a tool and making a thing. Can you, a mere mortal, really create a new reality from scratch, where everything is intentional and full of meaning? FUCK no! Nobody can do that! Sometimes I am lovingly imbuing every facet of my creation with meaning, and sometimes I go, "I need something there. Huh. That looks good." This is where platypuses come from! And I love them! If you don't love a platypus, WTF is wrong with you?

See??

Look, Creationism has no place in our schools. Natural selection is a thing. If I'm drawing on a real experience that involved blue or blue curtains, you may get some blue curtains. That is a real thing that happens all the time. It's not fair to torpedo someone's earning potential because, wherever you're coming from, blue makes you feel sad. You shouldn't be in a position to do that, that is not a job that needs doing.

*sigh* And, I will let you in on a dirty little secret. Sometimes I drop a stitch when I'm working, and I notice it later, and I realize I can hook that thing and make something look really cool and intentional. But it wasn't. It's there because I needed something there and it looked good. Ah, but as I've been writing, I've generated a reason for it to be there, and I now I have an opportunity to grab that sucker. I have picked up some amazing dropped stitches. I'm thinking of one in particular, a long series of dropped stitches, and when I was able to pick them all up in one swoop, I pretty much leapt up and screamed, "THE UNIVERSE IS A HOLOGRAM! I LIVE IN THE MATRIX! SOMEBODY PUT THIS HERE AND I KNOW IT WASN'T ME!" (I haven't published it yet, it's gonna be a while.) Be that as it may, you live in the Matrix with me, and the Architect might leave something like that for you too. It's not 'cos I'm doing it on purpose.

If everything must have a purpose and you're not allowed to enjoy the work unless you find every last one like it's Wally/Waldo, you may find that you've lost some of the gestalt, and the virtuosity, and the feeling. That's what started happening to me when I went to college to "learn about literature." There was value in that. Comp. Lit. was fantastic! But, they are trying to sort you into an appropriate pay grade (mine is "Institutionalized and/or Housewife") , and they must judge something. The amount of Waldos you've found is quantifiable! And so, the academic need to huck Art into a juicer also has a basis in Capitalism. Man, that shit gets everywhere.

If you love it, like Mrs. Hillburn, go for it. We see you, and we leave things for you to find, like the dev team hides gag gifts in Dracula's castle for the completionists. But if it sucks all the life out of the work and makes it a joyless slog, like it did for me - stop. Please. Or go rip up some other artist's work that's already been sacrificed for the purpose and analyzed to death. It's almost impossible to read The Great Gatsby for its own sake anymore. Even if you're out of school, you're still gonna remember finding the Waldos and tick all the boxes every time. I hope like hell going into the Public Domain can fix that.

I will finish with a tortured metaphor, because that's what I do. That's fun for me. Let's say I'm God. (Because I am. Did I say "simile"? Right. I'm God and your prayers are keeping Me up at night. Cut that out.) I've made this frog*!

I made him because I love making things - and because I love making things, I made a lot of things, and I think I'm pretty good at that. But it's no fun for Me if I don't get to share him with someone who can love him just as much as I do - for whatever reasons of their own. Adam! Look! Look at the frog I made!

Yes, Adam, you can play with him however you like! Isn't it neat how everything about him fits together? See his little toesies? If you rub his tummy, his little legs kick. Ha. Uh, you might be stressing him out a little, there, Adam. But that's okay! I made him for you to LOVE and...

Adam, what are you doing with the scissors?

Ah. Well, yes. Yes. The insides of things are very interesting. Yes, everything about him fits together. Yes, if you hook him up to a battery, his little legs kick. Ah, but he's dead. You do know that you've killed him, right? OK. Well, look, if you really want to understand how frogs work that badly, I don't mind if you cut one up...

Or two...

ADAM, THAT IS NOT WHAT FROGS ARE FOR! I want them to LIVE, I...

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, if that's how you want to play with the frogs, I guess...

ADAM. WHY ARE YOU CREATING AN INSTITUTION THAT TEACHES ALL YOUR CHILDREN THAT'S WHAT FROGS ARE FOR?

What? No! Don't... Don't PUNISH them for refusing to cut up the frogs, WTF is WRONG with you? No, no, of course they must engage with the frogs to understand them - I DO want all of you to understand them! Please don't ever think I don't! - but there's a LIMIT to... No, of course I still love you, but you don't have to...

If you do that to every frog you see, there will not be any more frogs, are you hearing me? I WILL STOP MAKING THEM OUT OF SPITE.

*sigh* No. Of course I won't actually stop making frogs, but... Can we at least come to an understanding that sometimes the curtains are blue?

*I know it's a toad. I needed a Public Domain image of a frog cupped lovingly in human hands, and the best image on the first page happened to involve a toad. Paul lives (as of this writing), and the platypus exists because I thought it looked cool. Now put down the onion and go analyze something else.