Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

@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

I have been dreaming of The House again.

I think I dream of The House maybe 12-20 times a year. It is not a house I have ever lived in, though it has some aspects of my second/current family home, my late (and very kind, and RICH thanks to my late Uncle Mac's 1979 investment in personal computers) Aunt Pauline's mini-mansion in Cleveland, and the Theta Chi house on Case Western Reserve campus.

It's a huge house, much nicer than anywhere I've ever lived in, at least where I wasn't living with 30 other people. Lots of windows. And most importantly, there is the Squeezy Thing.

The Squeezy Thing is a crack in the wall that only I can flatten myself enough to get through. It leads to a furnished, cozily run-down three-room lounge. When The House is in Ohio, it's where I hide all my weed and my *amazing* collection of gigantic sci-fi lookin' dream bongs. Huge plastic bubbly things, @Phorm could make a four-week resort vacation outta any one of 'em. 🧞‍♀️​❤️​

Usually there is Someone Else coming to the house-- the police, the landlord, pod people (but not the fun kind I would immediately surrender to)-- and I have to squeeze in. There's always a huge sense of triumph and mischief around The Squeezy Thing, and some of my worst nightmare are when it turns out They have another way into the Lounge...

Other than that, it's just night after night of phantom cats that need rescuing in some vague undefined way I'm not capable of, and of it being the last day of college and I have to either call my parents and move out in the course of two hours, or talk one of my old friends to take me in.

They never do. Mysteriously, these dreams started happening around the time I got kicked out of Transliminal. C'est l'amour. 🤷‍♀️​

@hystericempress A relatively staid acquaintance of mine just sent me the Pup Hood Discourse as an example of What's Wrong With These Kids Today and I am SO TEMPTED to just smack him in the snoot with your take.

@anthracite @xinjinmeng Also, this sounds like the intro to a New Wave song, quite likely by David Byrne. Or maybe Will Powers*.

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO128UhPivE

@zx3 In the immortal words of Gramma Sengir, "It helps pass the time until you die." <3

@chimerror BLARGH i hate that *dle games won't let you go back and play old once -- binging when you first discover one of these games is one of the biggest hooks >___<

@chimerror (scout's honor i hadn't looked at what country was in yours <3 )

@chimerror *eviscerates game like a lame gazelle* <3

@chimerror *learns about worldle*

*salivates*

🐯​🍽️​🌍​

@spottyfox Oh, I'd never even heard of those other two!

@spottyfox So... September 26, 1990.

@anthracite @xinjinmeng She has just been asked to be let out. I really hope she reads the pamphlet I gave her about the virtues of ground-related social activities.

@anthracite @xinjinmeng Princess Fogbrain checked in via the Squeakypawbs Method at around 3:30 pm and is currently bumbling around the apartment with her sister. <3

@JulieSqveakaroo Congratulations!