Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

@hummingrain

No. ​

*hug*

(But, then again, I wasn't sure then, either. I hate to get all Daoist on you, but... it's not that everything's going to be fine. It's that, for all we know, it could. Our minds are largely just not good at assessing our fates.)

(Or, to paraphrase one of my favorite comedians, in a panel quiz show where the goal was to talk the host out of suicide: "Don't worry! You WILL meet your doom eventually! You may just have to be a bit patient." *morbid smile and a hug* )

You know, I talk a good talk here about all my woes down in NOLA. But I just ate a veggie burrito for lunch and I feel so damn... virtuous.

And it dawns on me, I've never felt LESS like destroying myself, more interested in living on the straight and narrow, and more interesting in keeping myself alive.

I never talked about it, but The Thing with the ex-roommates came to a head with me being actively suicidal and running for the knife block in the kitchen, out of sheer panic and suddenly, catastrophically induced self-hate. I really thought for sure in that moment that it was all over for good.

And that phase of my life sure as fuck was. All crushed up and burnt. Thank god I had Peggy to offer up a getaway vehicle when I did.

Now I look back on that aftermath, "stuck" living with her in a cramped apartment in the University District, as one of the first really peaceful and quiet phases of my adult life, one of my best. And the one I'm in now could use a little work, but if this damn city doesn't drown us, it could be even better than the last one.

It does get better, folks. Or at least, it really, really can. I wish I could tell you everything will be all right, I really do. But I can at least tell you that it can. I offer up my prayers to the Raccoon Gods that you, too, will narrowly escape the trash compactor and find a newer, better place to live in than that dumpster. Fellow scavengers, there are treetops out there, with no stink, no predators, and well... at least *fewer* diseases.

I promise. ​👍​❤️​

@001zlnv fwiw, i... er, i mean My Friend Whose Facebook Account Totally Has Her Real Name On It... bitched out dupont at length right in the middle of an attempt at PR puffery, in your honor <3

@matoakit Yeah, honestly, I've done the "okay, look around the circle of people you envy and tell me, straight up, WOULD YOU TRADE?" game with myself. And I've always found it very therapeutic, because generally... no, I wouldn't!

I kinda LIKE the current arrangements of my scars and head divots. I earned them fair and square and damned if I'll give them up so easily. :>

"Nobody will fuck Spider Jerusalem... but then, nobody else gets to wield the Chair Leg Of Justice either." -- me, in a conversation about how I never got to be One Of The Polycule Cuties (polycuties?)

#🐯🐯🐯

@frameacloud @Leucrotta I hope @anthracite is frantically taking fashion notes on all this. :) I should probably turn her attention to the pics I got of the Dark Crystal-inspired fashion line at the Atlanta Center For Puppetry Arts, too...

We were already talking about a rule of thumb for Noa and Kirt's designs: "Good" Noa and Kirt are Fraggle Rock/Sesame Street Muppets. "Bad" Noa and Kirt are Dark Crystal/Labyrinth Muppets. :) Both versions should look a little otherworldly, a little beautiful, a little fae, and more than a little sketchy, like the no-account space-hippie scavs they are. :)

@matoakit I really sympathize with you there. I helped build a community that had everything I'd thought I wanted, came just within grasping distance of the transcendence and intimacy I was looking for, and then watched the whole thing collapse within the space of a year, due largely to things that were arguably my own damn fault.

Ever since then, I've kinda been in exile in a strange (but pretty) town, with no real-world social contacts except for my wife. I've moved from a legal cannabis state into a state of utter sobriety (and weathered it far better than I feared). Two of the best parts of my life are my domestic routine and my day job, and I NEVER thought I'd be the sort of person who could say that and not want to jump off a building over it.

I'm really lucky compared to a lot of my friends. My new hometown of New Orleans is goddamn gorgeous—and decadent, even if I haven't quite figured out how to get a piece of that and probably never will, introvert that I am.

And I basically married the best creative partner I've ever known, and the parts of my day that aren't spent on my day job are spent on my *real* job of trying to write the objectively queerest possible YA sci-fi comic with her. :D

But I still sit and sweat what I've lost every day, and wonder exactly when the lyrics to the Talking Heads' "Once In A Lifetime" became a concise abstract of my own adult existence. I don't know if there's any going back, besides looking at the kids who are basically living the life *I* wanted—hoping to the gods that some of the bridge that got them there was built with my spent old body.

I dunno, probably none of this is consoling to you in the least, and I apologize for venting at you like this as a near stranger. I just wanted to let you know your words rang really true with me, and you're not alone. Hugs offered if wanted. <3

@001zlnv I think I've got them unlocked as a player character. =^___^=

@Leucrotta @frameacloud @anthracite Now I kinda wanna give them Robert Smith/Edward Scissorhands/Siouxie Sioux hair. ^____^

@Leucrotta @anthracite Sadly, I think I'm gonna veto the skulls because death imagery Just Ain't Parallax, but this thread inspired a whole bunch of ideas about the kind of transformative, mutant imagery I DO want... <3 To the Vek-10, the Evil Mixolynes Menace isn't about the threat of death—at their tech level, there really ain't any. It's about the threat of absolutely unchecked, disordered, heretical GROWTH with absolutely nobody at the helm...

@frameacloud @anthracite Oh, and some aberrant/pathological botany. Anthy, hit me up for some samples of tree burls and plant galls...

@frameacloud @anthracite Ooh. ACTUALLY. Peg, maybe some siren/lamia/mermaid influence in there? Or hit me up for some sample art of the kelpies from My LIttle Pony. Or see if Froud has ever done a nice classic-pooka design... A pretty, pretty nightmare. I still think some of the more rococo/hyperrealist Queen Chrysalis fanart out there might be inspiring...

@frameacloud @anthracite Nah, honestly, the advice is genuinely much appreciated, but in this case we're kinda going for "elegant AND noble AND possibly evil." Parallax is less about threats of physical violence and death and more about transformation.

If it clarifies things any, Dark Noa's supposed to look more "evil like Jareth" then "evil like Sauron." An Erlkönig, basically. Dangerously pretty.

The threat is not that they'll run you through with poison spikes, but that they'll charm you into following them into the fairy veil and make you cavort with them for all eternity, forgetting your own name and everything you loved in your process...

(*shudder*)

Thank you for giving me the inspiration to clarify the design a bit, though! All criticism is good criticism, even if it's about what the characters _aren't_. <3

@mmsword @Cerulean Wait, the what now? Is this a city, neighborhood, or building-wide thing?

Careful. I'm pretty sure this one's a mini-boss. ​

@JulieSqveakaroo When they serve up the power pills, ask for a double—you've earned it. *hug*

@chandra @anthracite Yeah, specifically the quote "These mnemonics may be misleading when written this way. For example, misinterpreting any of the above rules to mean 'addition first, subtraction afterward' would incorrectly evaluate the expression"

plus the fact that they're all written with a slash in-between the equivalent ones to denote that they're a single equal group (e.g. "Division/Multiplication" instead of "Division, Multiplication")—but I can see how it would give the impression that these are two different hierarchies, they REALLY don't make that super explicitly clear with the language used

Thanks for the backup, bunny :D

@packbat I mean, *yeah*. :) Totally agreed, and that's one of the things that annoys me about all this, the artificiality and impracticality of this equation. It really rubs me wrong that people are looking at something that defies all convention and arguing in terms of what's "right" or "wrong" for it rather than thinking about what conventions went into it—or failed to—in the first place. I'm a LONG since fallen math jock, but I used to be one many decades ago, and I'd never use notation like that.

Well, not never. The only circumstance I can think of where it might actually be natural or useful is a low-level algebra class where the equation starts life as something like a ÷ b(c+d) and you substitute terms one at a time. But then I'd STILL use a horizontal bar to denote division if at all possible, e.g.

8
-----------
2 (2+2)

The whole thing feels like creates an "ambiguity" that only exists because of bad, unrealistic notation—a problem that's been solved ages ago, really.

@anthracite I... I think there's more to it, but it's complicated so I can get into it when you get home. :) Short version: that's not part of the actual rules, it's a common student misunderstanding of each. (e.g. there isn't actually supposed to BE a precedence of multiplication over division in either) However, again, I'm NOT 100% sure on this and I'm still half-immersed in work—that's just my current impression and you may have spotted other things I didn't! (one dot...)

@anthracite I'm not 100% sure, but I think if I'm reading it right, it's not so much a mathematical but a nomenclatural difference, i.e. exponents are called "orders" or "indices" in this context and "parentheses" are called "brackets." I think they're essentially describing the same thing, and the two sets of conventions being described in the Mathworld article (i.e. whether "implicit multiplication by juxtaposition" takes precedence over division signs) are a different thing?