Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

this sinking feeling that for the rest of my life, i'm gonna look to most of my trans friends like nothing more than a "before" picture

@JulieSqveakaroo @anthracite Yeah, I'm honestly delighted at how the whole thing's worked out. It also gives me hope that my little buddy Umbra who preceded him met a similar good fate...

@anthracite o/` Goodbye, Stripey Pooplord, who could hang a name on you... 'cause your brothers look just like you... still I'm gonna miss you o/`

@Balinares

*transfers her consciousness to a suitably small raccoon body and sits on your head*

YOUUUUUU! I have had "Gypsy Bard" stuck in my head for the better part of a week now and I blame YOU! *hiss* *fuss* *froth* *gnaws on your cranium with soft plastic teeth*

( <3 )

A recent tweet made me realize another thing I'm proud of: ours is one of the precious few stories I've ever seen that's set in a world where mortality is reversible... and the characters, in their reactions to death and the rituals surrounding it, actually ACT LIKE IT.

Mild spoiler, Noa and Kirt actually talk about Kirt's Death Habit like the traumatic-but-recoverable event that it is. The only issue is the hovering uncertainty of whether a Mixolyne can be brought back without being... a bit off, compared to the person they were.

Granted, when you're working on your 30th or 40th demise like Kirt... yeah, OK, it's a pretty big concern. That boy is starting to suffer from some pretty serious Bird Drift.

I just converted an entire pound of kale into unhealth food and I am very pleased with myself.

@mawr The weather down here ALMOST makes up for the unavailability of said integer. :D

🖼

@Austin_Dern @001zlnv Now I can't get this image out of my head of a rabbit in a babushka, lecturing us in a thick Russian accent about how they didn't have it so good when they were kids... "Bah! You kit today eat the pellet and still you complain! When I am your age we eat nothing but the pine needle soup!"

Man, I REALLY need to get my butt in gear on "No Pizza On Luna."

I haven't talked about it much. It was based on a dream I had, that there was an anime about @acetone_kitten's mooncat boi Haruki getting recruited to fight Monsters Of The Week, in a holographic MMO that had been seamlessly interwoven with reality, only to get tied up in complicity with an amoral Pynchonesque corporation, then find out he was trapped in a dying metafictional world... that wasn't metafictional before his employers made it that way.

It gradually turned into a satire of Bush-era globalization and reality-supplementation, a fish out of water story about a hypothetical SANE person being dropped into a "fake news" world. The rest of society seamlessly hallucinates that the "monsters" are real; the mooncats' "superpower" is that they see right through them.

Oh, and I decided to swap Haruki's role with his "MMO-reward pet" Alba (who some of you may remember better as CabbitAnalytics@Birdsite), because it all worked SO MUCH BETTER with a female lead and a bishie-boi sidekick.

Oh, and something something pizza. The title's based on an old SNL sketch that ends with the line "Sven and Inga had fooled death: there is no pizza in Sweden." I had to work it in somehow, so Alba's only trustworthy Terran friend is an eccentric "dada pizza artist" named Zaffo, basically the Peggy to my Alba and Ace's Haruki.

And then (except for the pizza) it basically all really happened. 🙀​ And I should really get my ass in gear and write it while we're at Peak Wingnut, before society ruins it all by recuperating.

@hystericempress You're one of the good ones, sis. 😺​

No full-grown dog under 10 lbs. should ever be named "Leo." Man, lions got enough to be embarrassed about. 🐯​

Just as I was starting to get the "nobody cares, nobody's reading" grumps about Parallax again... two people here mention it out of the blue, and a total stranger on Birdsite retweets my pinned tweet about it out of the blue. ^______^

I had replied to the latter's tweet about the importance of distinguishing the _portrayal_ of something problematic from the _approval_ of something problematic.

Specifically, she was (rightly) angry at people getting all Woke And Cancel-y over her putting "normal"-seeming abusive people in her stories... when her whole issue was that _she_ grew up thinking abusers were always strangers and monsters... and never recognized the abuse in her own life until she was an adult. And all she wanted was for there to be some representation of people who were abusive but complex... and thus, of the people they abused.

I think I'm gonna keep her in mind and ping her when we're on Chapter 2... when the cracks in the Mixolyne bois' relationship with their Elders start to show. I owe her a debt of gratitude for making me realize this _is_ a story about parental abuse in some ways. Maybe the fact it's all allegorical stuff about coldly indifferent worldminds, treating their genetic spawn as pawns, will make it easier to digest for some people.

In the meantime, I'm just palming my face over how every. damn. generation. seems to have to relearn this lesson of "Showing it doesn't mean you support it." I grew up angry at the right for thinking that way. It was a formative part of my personality development. And now it REALLY creeps me out that it's our side doing it.

catra/john wick slashfic.

i'm out, y'all. back in the morning when the internet refills, because i have clearly hit bottom. good night.

So today is kind of a gloomy, lukewarm, "Seattle in NOLA" kinda day, and I decided to try going downtown and check out a pizza place on my list to cheer myself up.

And our detour bus to get around the Hard Rock disaster stopped 12 blocks short of its destination and I had to get out and walk.

And then two blocks short of pizza glory, I find out why. There's a Christmas parade. Today. December fricking seventh. And I have to take another eight-block detour to get around it.

Happy ending, though. I dropped my grudge the moment I saw the horde of bluehaired women in metallic corsetry, the pizza (Roman "al taglio" style) was amazing, and I'm coming home with parade beads for the dragonlady's hoard.

@Sig @Jonas *cackle*

I can hear Shadow basically giving us this exact routine, but in a Cajun accent. :D

@Leucrotta Eye of Fatima? Oh god, I know that song by heart. <3

Similar energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkj08gKSrAY

@frameacloud @anthracite You have no idea how much that comment brightened my morning. Thanks for thinking of our creation! <3

@Sig Wait what?

@Oneironott Not without a VERY advanced crypto lab, and that only happened once... *blush*