Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

@JulieSqveakaroo @Phorm

...

...

...

*slow clap*

*rises to feet*

*standing ovation*

@JulieSqveakaroo @Phorm Pints o' cream! Pork cylinders! Potato grids! Artificial bacon! Large macs!

@Phorm "That's right, Phorm! Isn't science fun? And now, if we just hook this bottle of liquid nitrogen up to *your* bottle, we see a very interesting phenomenon occur! You see, the chocolate ghosts can't see and hear like we can! But they can sense cold, which is how they feed! Isn't that interesting, Phorm? Phorm...? Phorm? You OK in there, Phorm? Would you like some sprinkles?"

@JulieSqveakaroo @Phorm mission accomplished 🦅​

@Phorm Like, say, a Klondike Bar or a (cough) Inuit Pie? Brace yourself for wonderment, my dear: That is a chocolate ghost! It seeks out ice cream and "possesses" it, if you will, as a benign host until its earthly business is completed.

@monsterblue Not directly! I was thinking more of an embryonic form of chocolate, like a "ripple" in ice cream*, and a pupal form like, say, those crispy little chocolate (or pseudo-chocolate) flecks you often find in , say, mint chocolate chip instead of actual chips.

* as opposed to, say, a tesseract in ice cream, which is very expensive and usually not seen outside of Vermont

the life stages of chocolate are as follows:

the ripple
the flake
the minichip
the chip
the chunk
the chonk
the chungus

beyond "chungus," metric suffixes are recommended, as in the Kilochungus that dominated the landscape of Hershey, PA from the date of the Great Cacao Event of 1903 until its melting and containment by the EPA in 1987

@JulieSqveakaroo @Phorm I can vouch for this one, had one briefly in the arcade at my hometown mall!

@Phorm Yeah, the game he's describing sounds AMAZING, it's just clearly not Cube Quest. :>

But yeah, I really have a soft spot in my heart for Ken Nordine. Used to listen to his Word Jazz stuff on NPR. And he did one of the few songs that can 100% consistently make me cry, in part because it always reminds me of @anthracite...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WusDZdaQAs

@Phorm There's never anything unsettling about Ken Nordine. That is my #1 favorite human voice narrating that. <3

headcanon: plushies are immune to the tommy westphall effect

if you have to cross over between fictional universes always send a plush friend first to test it out

unless you WANT to end up all metafictional inside a snowglobe

buddy

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@Austin_Dern To be fair, there's not much payoff for remembering Young Einstein.

@monsterblue The first time I met Spike, I reached out to pet him. Now, this was foolish and impudent of me to start with. Bookstore cats are the most jaded creatures on the face of the earth, pettings are an inflated and virtually worthless currency to them, and I was lucky to get away without blood being shed.

But Spike, he just looks straight at me. And I could swear I see him shake his head "no" a little. And he just reaches out with both paws, claws totally retracted, and just HOLDS me by the wrist and STARES until I get the message and back off. And then he goes straight back to sleep.

I felt I had learned something very important about interpersonal relationships from Spike that day.

Oh, and even though I'm about 90% sure they were identified as biologically XY by the Trap-Neuter-Release folks who snipped them, and I'm sure I've mentioned this several times, Olive's new Food Guy still absolutely persists on calling them a "her."

Which is hilarious because I had called her Olivia prior to her snippage too! So... yeah, even our kittens turn out trans. :D :D :D Guess that settles that I go back to calling her Olivia! Although he just calls her Wilykit and her brother Wilykat apparently. :D

You hear that, Spike? I didn't forget what you taught me! I raised my kids right!

(Spike was a transmale housecat I met at a lesbian-owned bookstore in Cambridge, MA. Spike's owners described him as a "gender warrior." Spike was a judo master. This is not even my only story about Spike. Spike was a great cat, the third greatest cat I've met outside of Clan Shadow. The second was the late and much-missed Ginger, who taught me that head-chewing is a valid from of affection. The greatest of all, Seraph, is a story for another day.)

https://twitter.com/zebratron2084/status/1454295886658428931

@anthracite NO 😾

@Phorm @xinjinmeng Oh, it's THAT kind of play, is it? 🤨

@Phorm @xinjinmeng *grins salaciously at the both of you* "Nothing to be done. So... what are you doing with your boots? Pity we haven't got a bit of rope. Someone's sure to come tomorrow."

@JulieSqveakaroo @001zlnv Pac-Quack!

@JulieSqveakaroo WHOOOOOOOOOO!