testudoaubrei-blog

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I think if you taught jack aubrey about how certain kinds of codes and codebreaking were math he’d get really into it (because this is the guy who learned calculus in his thirties for fun) and eventually he’d get better at codes than stephen (because this is the guy who thinks 12x6=92) and run circles around stephen. like, absolutely smoke his ass. and stephen would have to sit there like, That’s wonderful. :) I’m not mad. I’m actually the least mad anyone’s ever been. Excuse me, I have to go outside for a moment (yelling from offpage)

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Concept: John loses all his phenomenal cosmic power and has to go back to being Just John. Gideon shoves him in a sack and puts him on a transport to a shepherd world, which saves his life but gives him a whole new world of problems. Now he has to survive on his wits and charm and most terrifyingly of all.... on the kindness of strangers.

I think I'd call it. The Emperor's New Groove.

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Game where the ancient hero is awakened from the deathless sleep of centuries in the hour of their people's greatest need, only to find that civilisation is thriving and there are no obvious threats on the horizon; the game then becomes a fish-out-of-water detective sim as they try to figure out what woke them up, and also solve other, smaller mysteries along the way.

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Despite people recommending me one because I like the other (because people accurately assume that if I like one pair of space lesbians I will like another), the Teixicalaan novels and the locked tomb books are incredibly different in a lot of ways. One is self indulgent and pulpy and gleefully weird and winkingly referential. The other is a much more overtly serious couple of novels about serious ideas. One is a detailed, intimate character study/weird meditation in an absurd universe which isn’t supposed to make sense, the other is a historically inspired study of how politics and power actually works in a world that seems painfully plausible.

But one thing that unites them (other than being well written books by writers with nuanced minds and interesting things to say) is that they aren’t interested in sermonizing. They are novels about Empire that feel no need to tell you that Empire, itself, is bad (the reader is left to their own conclusions) nor do they flatten themselves and flatter their readers righteousness by making Empires opponents straightforwardly praiseworthy. They still have their moral cores, but they haven’t confused novels with manifestos. In general they aren’t afraid of ambiguity and ambivalence and it’s nice to read books that seem unafraid of people online deciding that they are Problematic.

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anti rpf people are so funny they're always like "how would you feel if people shipped you with your friend" i don't know how to break it to you but if i was famous and no one was writing fanfiction about me i would be devastated. i wouldn't feel like i made it until i could search my name on ao3 and find 10k+ explicit results. peace and love though

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There is such a fascinatingly small amount!

does anyone have good fanfic of the teixcalaan series please please please please please please

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Maybe this was just how my family did things growing up but when I was a kid and we saw a lady with chin hairs or a small chest or large feet or a broad shoulders we’d say “it’s rude and mean to pick apart someone’s appearance” and mind our own damn business.

Apart from being reductive, transphobic, and anti-woman, all this “transvestigating” nonsense is just plain bad manners, and I think we should say that more

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I've been rereading TLT and as much as I love the insane lesbian angle, I can't stop thinking about how Harrow as a child fell instantly in love with Earth.

She grows up in the darkest, saddest, deadest corner of the solar system, deprived to the point she's unable to tolerate bright light or really even much flavor in food. And she sees the face of Earth, and without understanding what she sees, loves it. my ecologist heart feels some type of way about this.

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“[…] and I think you’re wrong, Your Brilliance, you’re wrong to go along with Three Azimuth’s idea, this isn’t my Teixcalaan. The one you’re building.”

Eight Antidote has my whole heart in this book.

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If you like ds9 may I pitch you on a memory called empire by arkady martine

Science fiction duology

Fundamentally grapples with the impacts of both cultural and military colonization on the colonized and their society

Explorations of cultural taboos and where they come from

Exploration of the difference between memory and identity a key piece of technology is an implant that gives you the memories of everyone who had it before

Queer characters!

Person who grew up on a space station and how life on a space station is fundamentally different than life on a planet

Murder mystery in space 🚀

Wormholes

Hive minds and how to do diplomacy with them

Being besties with your first officer

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Celebrate responsibly.

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me and the boys have a couple of chains wrapped around the sword in the stone hooked up to mikes toyota tundra gonna pull that fucker out like a tooth.

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Re read Into Thin Air and just awed by the ability of the press and general public to take a humane, even handed and in many ways pessimistic and non-didactic narrative of a disaster and turn it into a morality play of rich dilettantes who deserved to freeze to death and the poor exploited Sherpa would would have been better off if tourism money had never found its way into the Khumbu. So basically the opposite of what he wrote.

Goes to show that moralistic misreadings aren’t just a problem on this webbed site.

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Pink Flamingos (1972) - dir. John Waters

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Watching some of the supplements to the pink flamingos criterion and this performer in the movie, Elizabeth Coffey was pre-op while filming, and if you’ve seen the movie you know she famously or infamously exposes herself on camera. Fast forward 50 years to a retrospective of John waters in 2022 in a Baltimore art museum, and I guess they’d made their bathrooms gender neutral somewhat recently and also named the bathrooms after John waters. So John invited Elizabeth Coffey who is also still alive and an advocate for trans seniors to come and be the first person to piss in their newly gender neutral bathrooms lol which seems like a very John waters thing to do lol

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"divine feminine" "divine masculine"

wrong. Divine.

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John Waters with his parents, 1979

Photographer: Thornton Daniels, courtesy of John Waters