Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

@Austin_Dern do you just spin your ankles round and round sometimes just to squick people?

'cause i sure would :D

it's so brave of you to own us by playing that mediocre buggy game and ignore all of those valid social justice issues we raised about it

i wish you could see the ten minute standing ovation i am about to give you

in miniature

with both my middle fingers

Doing much better today, incidentally!

The short version is, a change has been made to my brain meds regimen, I didn't want to talk about it for Historical Reasons Pertaining To A Former Residence, and I was a right grumpy pain in the butt yesterday.

I got into a small tiff with Peg that neither of us wanted to be in, over the fact I couldn't find a safe low-stimulus place in the apartment to do my day job and wasted FOUR HOURS trying. My mood crashed due to the guilt and frustration at myself, and it just snowballed for most of the day.

But Peg handled it with CONSUMMATE draconic grace and patience, and ultimately just solved the problem by dragging me out and stuffing a much-needed pizza into my face. And today I feel fine.

@frameacloud I mean, I could invent scenarios where it could be manipulative if called upon to do so? My general rule of thumb is that *any* speech act can carry *any* emotion under the right circumstances and context.

But in general? Yeah, it just sounds like basic politeness and would... require extraordinary circumstances to read as "manipulative" just for a thank you.

It's been such a comforting feeling, in the otherwise nightmarish environs of social media, to know that any given furry "novelty" account has a non-zero chance of being someone I knew and liked Way Back When.

This is emphatically NOT a request for anyone to out themselves. I like it much better this way, same way I miss all the anonymity of Taps. Don't break the illusion. This is WONDERFUL. <3

@PennyPennyPenny Go forth and conquer gender on our behalf! It's comforting to know that any changes you make will be mirrored 2↑↑↑↑↑x (where x = "meow") times throughout the multiverse. 💜​

You know what I'd be 100% in the perfect mood for this week?

A giallo* TTRPG. Something really garish and bloody and decadent that doesn't take itself too seriously. Something that gives my Inner Nutcase an excuse to get stabby and melodramatic in a harmless padded environment.

Ooh. Even better, base it in the Over The Edge RPG. Al Amarja is already canonically set just south of Sicily. It's probably the closest thing to a giallo RPG ever made.

Shit. If I had any faith I'd have the energy for this in the coming months, I'd be tempted to RUN something like this. I know there aren't a lot of horror fans here... and I'd need months to give myself a good enough refresher on giallo to write a good adventure, but...

Would anyone actually join me for this madness, maybe even help co-GM? I know I sure have a lot of Stabby saved up from the last four years, and I would love to offer some valid targets for it.

(I promise you a LOATHESOME antagonist. I already have ideas.)

*a genre of vivid, stylish Italian shock-thrillers from the 70s

@LexYeen Sadly we JUST got done recycling our impressively large collection of Miniature Cat Hotels this weekend.

Haha, you're so right though. The kitten room was SO FULL of shredded little cardboard strips when we mucked it out. XD

Bizarrely, the two biggest non-Peggy, non-you-folks things that had the most immediate and obvious positive impact on my depression today:

(1) Finding out our neighbor across the street is also really fond of our cats. OK, that one's not really that surprising. ^__^

(2) Watching a video of cuneiform being written on a clay tablet with a stylus, and finally realizing, "Oh! Those letterforms actually make a LOT of sense if these are your writing tools!"

My brain keeps screaming out an anxiety alert, but no matter how hard I look for a real issue, all that seems to be there is "I'm desperately hungry for something that I don't strictly require to stay alive, no I can't tell you what, and yes I'm going to keep screaming until I get it."

Christ.

I really do have an Inner Cat.

@spacewastrel@yiff.life Nah, honestly, a lot of this is expected bad brain weather due to medical-related stuff that is a known issue I just am not ready to talk about. (I'm intact and should remain so, promise! :) )

The suicidal ideations bubbling up are concerned but not at all surprising, and I know them well enough to know their chance of escaping into action are 0%. I just have too many Nice Things in my life right now to listen.

But venting it all out here in the meantime is EXTREMELY therapeutic as a way of organizing all this in front of friendly witnesses. Hope I'm not worrying y'all too much. Really, you're all doing exactly what I need, already, just by listening. <3

This is one of those days where taking Buddhist classes in college comes in real, real fucking handy. I'm sitting here just picking parts off of today's anxiety attack, Ship of Theseus style, in the hopes of proving once and for all that the causes behind it are completely Empty of any reality outside my own mental constructs.

I... I think I should be petting a cat for this, though. That wasn't in the original instructions. It's just a self-evidently good idea. Gotta go straight to the experts.

@duske And yet you reminded me that my own tormented nervous system LOVES too much spicy food. Thank you, you may have found me a relatively fast way out of today's bad brain weather. <3

ME: "Thanks, everybody! I'm nearly recovere--"

TWITTER: "Oh, we forgot, today is going to be full of before and after pictures of happy people who transitioned over the last four years! You're comfortable with that, right?"

ME: *aims fork at own eyeball, taking great comfort in the fact the brain, and thus the source of all my problems, awaits just behind it*

ME: "Sure. Sure, why the fuck not."

It's really difficult to convince yourself "the only thing that is actually broken is the alarm system itself" when it's wailing and flashing imminent doom at you, and it's always been the only system you have for detecting such, utterly misconfigured or not.

going back to bed until i can actually like things, anything at all, again

it's not that bad, should only take an hour or two

and yeah, there are major neurochemical factors going on that explain ALL of this, i just don't feel like talking about them rt now

i'll be fine, just need a venty/weepy box <3 might need it more often than usual in the coming weeks, though, so your patience is humbly requested <3

@Leucrotta This just sounds so fucking broken to me. We have a lot of similar issues with vague guidelines and stuff... but our management is EXTREMELY responsive to issues, even if it's just friendly commiseration and "yeah, we are getting around to fixing that, it's not you, we promise." The damage sounds less and less like it's starting on your end.

yeah

@Leucrotta And managerial culture is so ACTIVELY AND ENTHUSIASTICALLY dumb at ignoring those distinctions, and using its own power to just bulldoze through any of the problems that ignorance causes -- and blaming anybody but itself -- instead of FUCKING FIXING them.