Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

You know you're dealing with America's bizarre lopsided healthcare bureaucracy when "Oh, we're just weeks behind, sorry about that!" is the REASSURING answer.

At least I didn't fuck anything up, and now I have THREE CSRs who have told me my application should be okay... even if they did give me three completely mutually contradictory answers about WHY. *sigh*

So after reading a story about a parasite being found in someone's brain... a story that happened to be on Fox News... I have a truly nightmarish but truly cathartic idea for a body horror short story.

Immediately after a widely publicized string of teen fatalities due to lack of sanitary abortion facilities, a series of conservative male pundits make brutal, insensitive statements to the press about the "will of God." In response, a coven of teenaged witches gathers and invokes several ancient goddesses of war, fertility, and/or vengeance at once, begging them to band together and help them find cosmic justice.

With a week, all the offending pundits and pol start to suffer severe headaches, confusion, and cognitive issues, accompanied by gruesome hallucinations of various Bronze Age hells. It is investigated as a bioterror incident, but no cause nor symptoms are found.

Within a month, there are traces of unchecked cellular growth in the afflicteds' brains. They are dismissed as malign tumors. Surgeries are planned. Sanctimonious conservatives mourn, demanding the cause be found and the "terrorists" be brought to justice.

But before the surgeries can happen, something bizarre is found on one of the patients' scans: a well-formed human embryo developing inside their cerebellum. The other patients are examined. They're all brain-pregnant.

The story ends with the GOP's hand-picked team of Christian doctors breaking the news: the fetuses can not be saved without doing lethal damage to the patients' brains. But the moral path is abundantly clear and the surgical tables are prepared...

Don't mind me, just murdering entitled one-star Yelpers with my spooky Martian psionic powers again.

If your Aunt Karen suddenly keels over, screaming "BUT... BUT THE CRUST WASN'T JUST HOW I LIKE IT" as her hair smolders, my bad.

@mawr "'If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by. Because your enemies are incompetent tossers." --probably not Sun Tzu 😼​

Cheech and Chong (not to mention Negativland) said that if you listen to Black Sabbath at 78 RPM, you hear God.

Well, I don't have a turntable, but I do have Youtube. And if I listen to it at 2x speed, I'm essentially listening to it at ~66.6 RPM, right? That should at least get SOMEBODY'S attention, right.

And tbh, these days I'm a lot more interested in what that other guy has to say anyhow. :p

Well, at least my social-ineptitude self-hate nightmares are getting better. This time I accidentally collapsed the roof of a community theater in... but at least I guess I didn't get caught?

Some part of me really doesn't like me. That's okay, since sometimes I'm not really sure how I feel about that stupid irascible bumbling cat myself.

@mmsword No, but that one's on my list. I kinda want to get around to reading the novel first...?

@mmsword Right? Have you seen Hereditary? Ari Aster's one of the most cunning damn audience manipulators I've ever had the pleasure of being fucked with by...

I also love the whole subversion of having a horror film take place largely outdoors, in bare golden (midnight!) sunlight and pretty blue skies, right in the middle of a genuinely pretty festival. I hear rumors that the protagonists are pretty immune to Genre-Induced Stupidity, too.

Ohhhhh shit. Midsommar premieres right on my birthday... Assuming I'm not in Ohio with my family that day (probably postponing the yearly trip a bit this time), real tempted to have myself a REAL disturbing 44th. This film's shaping up to be everything I've ever wanted in a grotesque waking nightmare. >:D

@JulieSqveakaroo I NEED A SKETCHBOOK AND SOME ARTISTIC TALENT, STAT! <3

@KinkyTurtle Then you have to use the side door, underneath the building, to everybody's left.

@Leucrotta I mean, you're probably already way ahead of me on knowing where Dick Dale cribbed the fundamentals of surf rock...

Just pondering something, inspired by an ongoing conversation...

I've always thought of myself as kind of the Harry Houdini of postfurry... and not just because I've pulled some mighty escapes from the consequences of my stupidity. 😼​

It's more that, at least from the random scraps I've read about him, he was one of those "skeptics" who went in to debunk things with the serious, deep-down hope that someday somebody would prove he was *wrong*.

I really want there to be real magic. I think living as if it were real and being wrong is probably far healthier than what most people do— take our shitty "real" material world as a good model for their internal, symbolic realms. As if the material world were the way it is because it was a good idea somehow, and not because it was all that was available to us...

Also, I don't think that stuff that most people take for the "real" world is actually related to the genuine, noumenal world at all. You know, atoms and superstrings and stuff. :) In fact, it is a fundamental part of my belief system that you basically just can't get there via human brains. In a very meaningful sense, even that desk and chair are more like categories than things, albeit very useful categories that it's very useful to treat like things...

But anyway! Speaking of imaginary people, I have a dragon lady to pet. And it's not so much that I think she "really is" or "really isn't" a dragon, so much as I really just don't think I give a fuck about the distinction much anymore, except as far as things like "can she actually be used as a source of fire in this body." :>

Good night, whoever and whatever you are!

@Oneironott I got a little queer space-fungus family to take care of now. It'll be okay. ❤️​

Especially since Peg and I just came up with some really heartwarming (and WEIRD) stuff for that little gator kid I boosted pics of earlier. ^_^ Their half of the plot is rapidly turning into a "how hard will you fight to protect your little queer family" tale and I'm so excited...

As much as I gripe about the relative social quiet... honestly, it's probably really good for my focus, and busting out Parallax script is probably Antler Mom's current Plan A for me. I'm not young anymore, I'm needed somewhere, and... that's okay. You kids go storm the castle and then fuck one another senseless, and I'll sit here and write the agitprop. 😽​

And just as I can't stand the idea of looking at one more %!@#%!# ambiguous South Asian address search, I realize I've got an online seminar coming up on Friday and basically have two free hours of work coming. Everything's comin' up stripeycat!

@Oneironott I hope I didn't spook you too much with that digression about "Fake" vs "Real" stuff a couple weeks ago! <3

It was DEFINITELY only supposed to be an admission of where my own philosophical roulette chips are on the table, and if somebody else does actually win by betting on the No, Literally Not Human jackpot I will be nothing but delighted. 😺

(There's a whole iceberg of personal background stuff there— a lot of it is about "I'd LOVE to believe this, but I got burned so bad by going all-in on Christianity once...")

Just follow what makes you happy— and make sure you can still navigate the material reality it's all (allegedly? i dunno, i do still have some philip k dick gnostic moments) happening in as comfortably as possible. You seem to be doing basically okay there, tailbrain. ​😽​

@Soreth @anthracite

🎵​Beautiful bloom 🎵
🎵Love the vest 🎵
🎵Knifey smile 🎵
🎵Oh yes 🎵
🎵Beautiful bloom 🎵
🎵Love the vest 🎵
🎵Who they chomped now 🎵
🎵We can only guess 🎵
🎵Cause they're NOM DADDY NOM 🎵
🎵Their love is NOM 🎵
🎵Cause they're NOM DADDY NOM 🎵
🎵Their love is NOM 🎵
🎵And their parents are so gay 🎵

(apologies to the Violent Femmes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekL7o8BQkZM )

I mean, I'll tell ya what, though, it worked. I definitely am feeling the "Research: 💯​" tonight. I mean, I just taught a coworker the difference between an Ortschaft and a Gemeinde without having to look it up.

Also, I mean, look at that LRB. Look at that little gatorbloom. Just look at 'em. Parallax is going great, and I have to admit my creative life is going great. It's just the connections— to you and to my inner "spiritual" life— through that creativity that I really miss. A lot. A fucking lot. 😿​❤️​

@Momentrabbit It's true. I just told Peg, after she fanned me the latest set of roughs, thank fucking god for Parallax.

I guess while I *miss* my creative and social lives being the same thing, this is probably the more Healthy Responsible Profitable Adult Way to use those skills? And that's not _necessarily_ a bad thing.

There are just a few vital changeling nutrients that I'm still a little deficient in here, but I know I'm preachin' to the choir. *hugs tight*

Once again, I find myself fleeing towards my day job, for emotional shelter from my increasingly vestigial social/imaginative life, and am being crushed en route by nostalgia for a day when it was the other way around.