Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

@Phorm Also, I probably just outed my new Reddit account that way, but... whatevs. You people already knew I was a contentious jerk. :)

@Phorm Heh, wait till you see the (possible fake) image that inspired it...

https://www.reddit.com/r/niceguys/comments/a7jgfm/yeah_the_woman_is_the_problem_here/

(cw: abusive language, misogyny, extreme "nice guy" behavior)

Just a reminder: if you're trans, I have probably already retconned your current gender all the way back to being a baby, and will have to be reminded if you're referring to a Lost Timeline. :D

Unless, of course, you're @LeDiva, in which case I have you retconned all the way back to kittenhood. <3

"If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel full of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel full of wine... you get sewage." -- Schopenhauer's Law of Entropy

Culture hero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg4-YnLcSF0

(attn @LeDiva <3 )

Ever since Trump started his campaign, the Evil Sociologist in me has had a morbidly curious impulse.

It kind of wants to see Leftist Trump. It's desperately curious what would actually happen if a narcissistic and incompetent socialist, maybe even an outright Leninist, got into office.

Would we fall prey to our own equivalent cognitive glitches? Could we become a cult of personality, too? Could we run a line of bullshit equivalent to the Birther conspiracy or Pizzagate?

I genuinely do not know. Our resilience against Trump's gaslighting has been pretty encouraging... but then, he offers us nothing good at all, so where was the challenge?

I've seen some pretty massive leaps of logic from our side during this mess. They've scared me sometimes. But it's so hard to judge them, especially in an environ this surreal, where the gaslighting has been so constant.

Could *our* madness just be a side effect of dealing with *their* madness, something that will heal up if our opponents just stop fucking with our information stream?

For instance, I'm still embarrassed to say, when my friends started insisting most of Trump's online support was coming from bots, I thought they were just dehumanizing the enemy. I was dead wrong on that one. Sometimes paranoia is the correct and factual response.

But I still wonder. Is there really something fundamentally different about us? Is this a conservative problem or a human problem? What exactly *would* it take to turn Us into Them? Could one bad agent, taking advantage of our own tendency to see ourselves as the Good Rational Ones, turn us into a personality cult?

My Inner Evil Sociologist can go fuck themself, 'cause this is not an experiment I want to see performed. I'm content to just leave this shit in the vault and never have to know.

I feel like more people should have heard of this woman. I sure hadn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Bassi

@zx3 WHERE'S YOUR SCIENCE NOW, SPALLANZANI!?! #spontaneousgeneration

HOCHHEILIGEFLIEGENDEKINDERSCHEISS

(Everything is fine, I just felt the need to utter the foulest curse in Discordian practice at the world in general. In case you're too lazy for Google Translate, it means something like "high holy flying baby shit." :p )

@kaputotter Huh. I like that name in general... but not for you. You've been basically retconned to just "Nat" in my brain. :D (What *is* your current preference anyhow?)

FWIW, I hate my given name too. :>

@Balina No, they have plenty of place, and hearing other people are going through the same kind of thing is IMMENSELY comforting. Thanks, moof. *hugs tight*

home safe in ohio <3

@anthracite

"I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them." -- Andy Bernard

The thing I hate most about travel is all the time it gives me to brood. Heart was a little fluttery on the flight -- probably just vagus nerve bullshit, but it got me thinking about death and loss.

I've had enough loss this year, dammit. I'm tired of everything feeling poignant and fraught all the time. I'm tired of feeling for the first time in 20 years like I'm totally adrift, with very few really close friends who will still bother to seek me out, and no safety net whatsoever if I fuck something up.

I'm tired of questioning myself and my basic decency every day. I'm tired of facing down a lifetime of precarity, where if I lose Peg I lose everything. I'm tired of thinking about the inevitability of losing my mom. I'm tired of simultaneously missing Kristy and Jessie *and* looking forward to never dealing with them and their aloofness again. I'm tired of knowing that when I go, most people probably won't much notice or care, in a place where I could have sworn I had tons of friends and a community the last time I looked.

I'm just tired. I'm glad I'm heading home, because I really needed this break. I wish I felt like I had *some* semblance of a home that didn't feel like it was slowly dwindling into nothing. I wish Rik and I hung out more. I wish I saw my remaining sisters, like, ever. I wish Seattle could ever feel like home again. I wish I could ever hope to have two people to cuddle in bed at once again. Most of all, I wish I could get a real hug right about now.

Thanks for listening, if anybody did. I'm sorry I didn't do better. I'll be okay.

Feeling weird and ghostly and alone, which is to say, I'm having perfectly normal and healthy emotions for an airport.

@anthracite Aww, now I feel REALLY bad about batting you away this morning. <3 <3 <3

@Aradia Sympathies!

Once upon a time, my poor mom grabbed a tin of cinnamon powder when she meant to grab chili powder. The resulting chili mac was... memorably unpleasant. :)

This kid has really good mlem technique. I feel like I learned a lot from this video. It's good to see some new ideas in tongue work.

https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/a738zn/being_a_kitten_is_tough/

I found this textfile on my desktop.

I don't remember writing it.

I think it might have been written sometime between the day I bought that bottle of tequila and the day I emptied that bottle of tequila. Some amount of kelp may have also been involved in its production.

For the record, @anthracite immediately insisted on performing a dramatic reading of the entire document. :D

@emanate @mawr @SangriaSnake Oooh, thank you, you helped me figure out how I would foil it. Include SO much information that you know EXACTLY what good and bad would come out of every single action. "Well, you COULD be living in an Italian villa rolling in money... but this adorable kitten would never find a home. It's up to you, me."