#thoughts to saint

[saint-ajax]

when you married ghost , it's automatic that you're married to the rest. that's why they call it one for one. hubby's friend comes over with just you in your robe, nude underneath, and price needs a little taste? no problem captain hubby, lieutenant's consent and yours is given. soap is drunk and needs help with his boner? baby, im here, it's okay. you assure him while simon watch you two proudly. while, kyle, his big respect to the both of you hindrances his needs. simon appreciates that, big time. at the same time, we're family here sergeant. you nod and brush your palm on top kyle's lap to gently assure him as you agree with simon, yes, that's right. let me help you, sweety.

it's just something to love about the concept of your beefy husband casually fucking you whenever he wants, and letting other gigantic men who are very close to him, share you.

[tapewires]

Slugcats of all shapes and sizes

[canisalbus]

What if I told you that RoobrickMarine went and wrote an entire novella starring my 16th century dog couple? It's very canon-adjacent, well researched and thoughtfully put together, has inspired me a ton during these past months and it's now publicly available at AO3. I highly recommend it.

✦ Separation ✦

[zhelin-thames]

Where Danny meets the rest of the Lantern Corps and causes more chaos

[Danny gets whisked away to Oa, the Green Lantern HQ.]

Danny: [looking around at glowing green architecture] Whoa, it’s like Tron threw up everywhere. Hal Jordan: [facepalming] Try not to embarrass me in front of the Guardians, okay? Danny: [grinning] No promises, Green Dad. Hal Jordan: [groaning] I’m not your dad.

[Danny Meets Kilowog]

Kilowog: What’s the deal with the glowing kid? He’s not a recruit, is he? Danny: Nope. I’m Danny, half-ghost, full-time troublemaker. Who’re you? Kilowog: Kilowog. Drill instructor for the Green Lantern Corps. Danny: [mock salute] Nice to meet you, Sergeant Glowstick. Kilowog: [laughs, clapping Danny on the back] I like this one. He’s got guts.

[Danny Learns About Other Lantern Corps]

Danny: [flipping through a hologram book] So, there are other ring colors? Hal Jordan: [sighs] Yes, but most of them are dangerous. Don’t get any ideas. Danny: [grinning] Oh, too late. A ghost-powered Lantern sounds awesome. Hal Jordan: You’re already glowing! What more do you want?!

[Danny Meets a Red Lantern]

Atrocitus: [growling, his ring glowing red with rage] Who dares step into my sector?! Danny: [floating nonchalantly] Chill, dude. You’re gonna pop a blood vessel. Atrocitus: [angrier] You mock me?! Danny: [grinning] Not my fault you’re part of the anger issues club. Do you guys hand out stress balls, or…? Hal Jordan: [grabbing Danny and pulling him away] Stop antagonizing the rage monster!

[Danny Meets a Blue Lantern]

Saint Walker: [calmly] You radiate unusual hope for someone straddling life and death. Danny: [grinning] Thanks. You radiate spa-day vibes. Saint Walker: [smiling serenely] I shall take that as a compliment.

[Danny Tries to Join the Sinestro Corps]

Danny: [looking at a yellow power ring] Fear-based powers? I scare people all the time! This would totally work for me. Sinestro: [looming] You think you’re worthy of wielding fear? Danny: [goes ghost, glowing green with a chilling aura] Boo. Sinestro: [startled] …Perhaps you are. Hal Jordan: [snatching Danny back] Absolutely not!

[Lanterns Watching Danny]

Kilowog: The kid’s like a tiny tornado of chaos. Saint Walker: And yet, there’s potential in him. Hal Jordan: Potential to give me a headache.

[Danny With the Black Lanterns]

Danny: [walking into a dark room] So, what’s the deal with these Black Lanterns? Hal Jordan: [panicking] No. Absolutely not. Get out of here now. Danny: [grinning] What? I’m technically dead. I’d fit right in. Hal Jordan: [dragging Danny away] You’re not meeting Nekron. End of discussion.

[Danny Shows Off to the Lantern Corps]

Danny: [blasting ectoplasm everywhere] My powers are cooler than your glowsticks, admit it. Kilowog: Let’s spar and find out, kid. Danny: [cracking his knuckles] Bring it on, Hulk Lite.

Danny phases through every construct Kilowog throws at him, laughing the whole time.

Hal Jordan: [watching in the background] Why do I even bother?

[Later, Back on Earth]

Tucker: You went to space and met aliens with power rings?! Danny: Yup. Turns out I’m way better at glowing than they are. Sam: Did you actually join any of the corps? Danny: [grinning] Nah, they’d never survive me.

[dirtgrubber]

intrusive thoughts….

so uhhh the latest chapter of “Of Saints And Sinners” was great. thanks again @morningstarwrites for being perfect

[hedgehog-moss]

Pls give recommendations for Odd books 🙏

Here we go, a list of literary oddity :) This post contains majestic spheres, alien taxonomies, cruel subway polytheism, a fourth-dimensional cat, disturbing earthworms, infinite space football, existential mussel terror, a Parisian absurdist time loop, and a picture of a telegraph-pole-man-cheetah. I'm not exactly recommending these books, in the sense that I won't take any complaints if you find them more odd than good, and some of them transcend the concepts of good and bad anyway.

• The Other City, Michal Ajvaz. It's all like this:

• Contes du demi-sommeil, Marcel Béalu ('Half-asleep tales') —is the book that prompted my post about stories that have no ambition or justification beyond being odd. I'm sad that it hasn't been translated :( One of the tales is about a strange opaline sphere that rolls on the road. It doesn't accelerate when the road becomes a steep slope but continues rolling majestically. At one point it floats away towards the sky. Someone wonders if it was the moon. Someone else says authoritatively "It was an angel's egg." Everyone is reassured by this explanation. The whole thing feels exactly like remembering a dream you had. There is also a man who reads too much and whose body atrophies so only his head is left and his wife puts it in an egg cup for better stability.

• Leonora Carrington— The Skeleton's Holiday, or maybe the Hearing Trumpet. I've read them so long ago but I think the latter is the one with the old ladies and nuns? There's also a guy who was murdered in his bath by a still-life painter because he said there was a carrot in one of his paintings, but it might not have been a carrot? It's hard to remember details from this book without feeling like I might be making them up. Bonus Leonora Carrington painting which kind of feels like a short story:

• The Codex Seraphinianus, of course. I wish there were more bizarre encyclopaedias out there.

Also I love this review:

• Sleep Has His House, Anna Kavan —I really liked the way this book used language; making life feel like a fever dream even more than in Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream (which I really liked too.)

The eye is checking a record of silence, space; a nightmare, every horror of this world in its frigid and blank neutrality. The actual scope of its orbit depends on the individual concept of desolation, but approximate symbols are suggested in long roving perspectives of ocean, black swelled, in slow undulation, each whaleback swell plated in armour-hard brilliance with the moonlight clanking along it . . .

• The second half of Michael Ende's Neverending Story, where things get stranger! I remember the hand-shaped castle with eyes and the city of amnesiac former emperors and the miserable ugly worms who cry all the time out of shame then create beautiful architecture with their tears...

• The Gray House, Mariam Petrosyan. This is the one I had in mind when I talked about a 'museum of the strange, but one you wouldn't want to be trapped in after closing time'. Another book that made me feel uncomfortable in a similar (good) way was Edward Carey's Observatory Mansions, the protagonist of which is a man who curates an odd private museum and can't stand the sight of his own hands.

• Oh, speaking of uncomfortable, and hands—He Digs A Hole, by Danger Slater. To me this book was in the more-odd-than-good category but I liked its refusal to have a coherent philosophical meaning. It's about a man who can't sleep so he goes to his garden shed and saws off his hands and replaces them with gardening tools. Then he starts digging a hole. And then it gets weird. (Read at your own discretion if you have a worm phobia; there's some body horror featuring sexually aggressive earthworms. And then it gets disturbing.)

• 17776 — Someone sent me an ask a few years back to recommend this online multimedia narrative to me and I really enjoyed it! Here's the summary, borrowed from the wiki page: Set in the distant future in which all humans have become immortal and infertile, the series follows three sapient space probes that watch humanity play an evolved form of American football in which games can be played for millennia over distances of thousands of miles. The work explores themes of consciousness, hope, despair, and why humans play sports.

• Saint-Glinglin, Raymond Queneau —the author admitted that this book presents some "internal discontinuities." I didn't like it much but I respect the talent it takes to write a novel where everything feels like a random digression, including the key suspenseful scene that matters to the plot. The one digression I loved had to do with the way the narrator is existentially horrified by various sea creatures. It's like he dreads them so much he can't help but think about them when he should be telling a story.

The oyster... This gob of phlegm, this brutal way of refusing the outside world, this absolute isolation, and this disease: the pearl... If I conceptualise them even a little, my terror starts anew. The mussel is even more significant than the oyster and even more immediately admissible in the domain of terror. Let us indeed consider that this little sticky mass whose collective stupidity haunts our piers, consider that it is alive in the same way as a cow. Because there are no degrees in life. There is no more or less. The whole of life is present in every animal. To think that the mussel, that the mussel has, not a conscience, but a certain way of transcending itself: here I am once again plunged into abysses of anxiety and insecurity.

Near the beginning he philosophises about what would happen if a man and a lobster were the only two survivors of the apocalypse. The lobster would break the man's toe and the man would say, "We are the only beings that remain on this devastated Earth, lobster! The only living beings in the universe, struggling alone against the universal disaster, don't you want to be allies?" But the lobster would disdainfully walk away towards the ocean, and "the sight of the inflexible and imperturbable lobster pierces the sky of humanity with its unintelligible claws." (I can't overstate how little this has to do with the rest of the book.)

• Autumn in Beijing, Boris Vian —needless to say the story does not take place in autumn nor in Beijing.* To the extent that it can be said to be "about" something, it's about people trying to build a train station in a desert with tracks that lead nowhere. (I just went on goodreads to check the title, and it's actually called Autumn in Peking in English. I also discovered that it was featured in a list of Books I Regret Reading. I liked this book, but I understand.)

(* French writers love doing this—like when Alphonse Allais said about his 1893 book The Squadron's Umbrella "I chose this title because there aren't any umbrellas of any sort in this volume, and the important notion of the squadron, as a unit of the armed forces, is never brought up at all; in these conditions, hesitating would have been pure madness.")

• The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins—I fear this one makes a little too much sense for this list, but you can't say it isn't weird; and I loved it and recommend it any chance I get.

• The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, Carol Hill —this book was so wacky and made me laugh. I've not yet managed to successfully recommend it to someone; its brand of odd didn't resonate with the people I know who've read it but that's okay. You could say it's about a woman astronaut whose weird cat disappears into the fourth dimension (or the quantum realm?) and she goes to space to save him—but that makes the book sound more straightforward and less messy than it is. Her cat leaves her a note before he disappears:

• The Bald Soprano, Ionesco —fun fact, there's a tiny theatre in the Latin Quarter in Paris where this absurdist play has been staged every night for nearly 70 years, with the exact same set design and costumes and everything, like the actors are stuck in a time loop. They celebrated the 20,000th performance this year! There's an actress who has been playing her character for 40 years and said joining this theatre was like joining a religion. I've been going to see this play as a New Year tradition with my best friend since we were 14, so I love it madly, though I wouldn't say it's good, necessarily—the author said it was about "absolutely nothing, but a superior nothing."

• Statuary Gardens; or Les Mers perdues (apparently not translated) by Jacques Abeille. This man is obsessed with weird statues. Unfortunately I find his writing style rather dull—I feel like he takes strange ideas and makes them feel mundane in a bad way...! But his books still have a nice, quiet, oneiric atmosphere, and images that stayed with me, like a solitary gardener trying to grow stone statues in the depleted soil of a walled garden. Here are some illustrations from the second one:

I'll look into some of the books recommended on my previous post! (and I agree with the people who brought up Cortázar, Borges, and Junji Ito. <3) Some potentially-odd books I have on my to-read list: Clive Barker's Abarat, Goran Petrović's An Atlas Traced by the Sky, Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper, Jean Ray's Malpertuis; Jan Weiss's The House of a Thousand Floors; Brice Tarvel's Pierre-Fendre.

[morningstarwrites]

Of Saints and Sinners Ch. 35 is out! Here's some outfit refs if you'd like to know what they're wearing 😌

[snickerdoodlesart]

Maybe not the best thing to post for Valentines, but I think its funny.

[thoughtkick]

You cannot make everyone think and feel as deeply as you do. This is your tragedy … because you understand them, and they do not understand you.

Daniel Saint

[spooksier]

shout out to the pronoun havers

[kyannnite]

danse macabre

(closeups below)

[vynnyal]

I've been having a delightful time stumbling over my emojis being used in random servers, so here's more

[jellyala]

“The Holy Shepherd”

Do you all have time to talk about our lord and savior Saint Vanilla Cookie??? 🙂

Beasts Ancients au belongs to 👉 @cuppajj

[hdra77]

MERRY CHRISTMAS!! i speedran this while struggling not to fall asleep and explode from a headache!! got a little too silly last night

[zhelin-thames]

Danny’s chaos with the Lantern Corps

Lantern Corps Shenanigans

[Danny with the Indigo Tribe]

Danny: [confused, looking at glowing purple Lanterns] So… you guys are all about compassion? Indigo-1: It is a power most misunderstood but deeply effective. Danny: That’s cool and all, but how do you fight with compassion? Hug people into submission? Indigo-1: [smiles serenely] Something like that. Danny: [turns to Hal] Okay, this one might be too wholesome for me.

[Danny Accidentally Meets Larfleeze, the Orange Lantern of Avarice]

Larfleeze: [hissing, clutching his orange ring] MINE! Danny: Whoa, chill, Tangerine Nightmare. I don’t even want your ring. Larfleeze: [growling] Everything you want belongs to me! Danny: [grinning mischievously] Oh, really? Then I totally want a pet ghost dragon. Larfleeze: [pauses, conflicted] …I don’t have one of those. Danny: [floating off] Thought so. Later!

[Danny Teams Up with a Violet Lantern]

Star Sapphire (Carol Ferris): Love is the most powerful force in the universe. Danny: [grimacing] I dunno about that. Love’s more Sam’s thing. Star Sapphire: And what drives you, young one? Danny: Mostly snacks and spite. Does that count? Star Sapphire: …We’ll work on that.

[Danny at the Green Lantern Bootcamp]

Kilowog: Alright, Poozer, time for training! Let’s see what you’re made of. Danny: [phasing through the ground] Made of ectoplasm and bad decisions, thanks. Kilowog: [laughing] Kid, you’re alright.

[Lantern Corps Debate]

Hal Jordan: He’s too unpredictable to join the Corps. Kilowog: He’s got guts, though. Saint Walker: His hope shines brightly. Sinestro: He could wield fear effectively. Larfleeze: MINE! Danny: [floating nearby, munching on chips] You guys know I can hear you, right?

[perfectquote]

It is madness to hate all roses because you got scratched with one thorn.

Antoine de Saint-Exupére