Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

Attic. *sigh*

I'm not too uptight about it. I knew this was gonna happen; one or two good nights wasn't proof we'd broken the cycle.

I got a look up in the attic myself for the first time. It's small and cozy. I see why she likes it. Doesn't look hazardous, either.

I've convinced myself she's mostly safe except for food and water risks. I HATE that we've got no other good plan right now, but I guess we leave her up there for a week with enough food and water to keep her going, and see how she feels about the attic afterwards.

It's gonna be a weird week.

@Phorm I read the date stamped on the bottom of the bottle and it says you're still good for at least another 40 years. <3

ladies. gentlemen. enbies.

I will not be truly happy until a troupe of queer furry bandits has set up an impenetrable camp outside a major US city, shut down an entire interstate, taken at least one Republican legislator hostage, slit the throat of said hostage when they inevitably try to cut a fake deal with them, and mailed their body back to Washington, postage due.

@mawr Yeah. This is psychic warfare, Wrinkle In Time shit.

At least the giant evil brain was a good administrator. Camazotz probably had single-payer health and good public transit. D:

Aunt Beast, if you're out there, we need you more than ever.

@mawr I never believe that about myself but it's comforting to hear it. *hug*

Helluva a year, eh? 😓​

Fuck it. Missing actual group conversation so much it's painful. Gonna start investigating how to start a Discord server. Will probably regret. :)

@mawr Yeah.

*hug*

Missed ya, mawr.

hav kiti

this is of course ZERO guarantee she won't go straight up into the goddamn attic the moment we let her outside, but artie's spent a whole day on the ground and that's pretty good

everything else is meh but can't complain, mostly "starland is full of very harsh tasks" and remind me to explain that expression some other day :)

"We made a healthy, informed and democratic decision to get back on churrascaria as soon as possible."

i am otoh PROFOUNDLY tempted to blow $50-100 on Brazilian BBQ delivery in one sitting just as a colossal middle finger to life, the universe, and some poor cow who probably didn't actually do anything wrong

this would be a really easy for to try to get me interested in heroin >_<

i know, i know, i never would-- i've seen trainspotting ffs

but it's one of those weeks where "fuck it, total numbness, and everything else you love just sloughs off of you" almost, almost, for a moment or two at a time, sounds like a good deal

dragon and cats and good food and queer comics sounds like a better deal if i can get it though

@Leucrotta That sounds so much like every experience I had while temping, it's like Lord of the Flies except you have quotas. -___-

@Leucrotta Heh, that's sounding a lot like New Orleans civil society right now. :> Sympathies, darlin', feeling powerless is just the worst goddamn thing, especially on the job. What obnoxious thing are they doing today?!

multiple failed attempts to contact neighbor living in occupied half of building artie keeps getting stuck in

the first of these was <20 minutes after seeing him out on his porch with the door open and saying hi, which he ignored

so yeah, i'm pretty much ready to write him off as a potential ally here, it's POSSIBLE he just... i dunno, really likes loud headphones or has had to pee every single time we've knocked on his door, or whatever...

i just really hope he's just generally a recluse and not quietly mad at us for being the "crazy cat people"-- my big fear right now is that he's gonna try to call the cops on us or something for bumbling around inside the abandoned apartment

granted as peg has very reassuringly pointed out, new orleans is (a) in the middle of its biggest police staffing crisis ever (b) dealing with a spate of carjackings (c) in the middle of mardi gras so the odds are not bad that he would be literally laughed at if he tried

sometimes it's nice living in what is effectively an anarchy, anyhow no resolution in sight, no plan except for longer and longer periods of leaving artie up there (with a little food and water), currently dealing with it with bad chardonnay and good weed 🤷‍♀️​

i can leave you, my truest friends who made it this far, with only one piece of wisdom: i believe deep down in my heart that all tragedy shall someday inevitably transmute into comedy

@Sig Uh... yeah. Don't get me started on "peak oil." I dated Postrodent. *smirk*

So as part of my continuing commitment to sifting through the detritus of our culture for you... I watched a few episodes of Head of the Class, the mid-80s sitcom about a class of gifted students.

Man, it's exactly the heap of bullshit I remembered. This show annoyed me back THEN, when I was barely a teenager, for getting the ins and outs of being a giftie so WRONG. (Dumb shit like answers at their College Bowl-style academic competitions being atomic weights to six decimal places... 🙄 Shit that made no sense, wasn't funny as satire, and just kinda proved to me that this show was written by the dull but hard-working A/B students who ​just kinda KNEW some gifties and had no idea what it was actually like to have YOUR BRAIN ALWAYS ON FIRE IN A BAD BUT VERY PRODUCTIVE WAY.)

Anyhow. It was crap, total crap, just hacky dated sitcom garbage. But the interesting part? One of the episodes was about the future. The kids were assigned to do a newscast set in the 2030s.

And they were all proto-doomers. The whole thrust of the episode was that the ex-hippie teacher (the guy who played Johnny Fever on WKRP) was super-optimistic about The Inevitability Of Human Progress and the kids were all convinced we were doomed. EXACTLY like kids today.

The really jarring thing, though?

Everything they were panicking about turned out... sort of all right. Nuclear war. Nuclear power. Acid rain. Pesticides. The ozone layer.

And it does kinda make me wonder about our crop of worries, dire though they are.

@001zlnv Oh, I like that even better! He's taken away and raised by the good guys on a steady diet of Bertrand Russell, Howard Zinn, bell hooks, and Stereolab, to be their ultimate secret weapon. Charles Lindbergh Junior-- TIME ANTIFA!

What if there's a universe one quantum hop over, where the Lindbergh Baby was never kidnapped and (presumably) murdered...

...and his fascist-sympathizer, racial paranoid POS dad raised him to be even worse than he was. And we basically get Donald Trump and mainstream American fascism 15 years earlier, except possible with a saner and more competent fascist-- one with a handsome famous aviator, one did a remarkable job of whitewashing the racism off his public image-- for a dad.

If I ever need a one-off villain for an alternate history story, it's Charles Junior for sure. Anyhow, it's a lesson in counting your blessings-- and in some tragedies being a blessing in disguise, one we'll never know about.

@chimerror Thus making it perhaps the ONLY map-inclusive game in the world that actually includes New Zealand. :D

https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/241139/world-maps-without-new-zealand