Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

Openly giggling like a supervillain over Parallax plotting, and the genius of my serpentine fiancee, for the second time today. ^___^

Snatch : Get Carter (1971)
pear cider : gin, neat

I like cider, but now that I've had it, I think I prefer gin.

(And some gods are like really cool aunties who will sit and have tea with you at the Adult Table and frankly dish Hot Divine Gossip and not lay that "come back in 100,000 years when you don't have dicks and boobs and things" Star Trek bullshit on you just because your species still fights and poops. >:D )

That, of course, is totally intentional, and one of the big thematic goals of Parallax is to put the boot into Special Elf People mythology repeatedly and mercilessly. All gods can scream. ^_____^

Oh, and of course, likewise Vampire: The Masquerade. If you don't have the Gift Of The Special People Thing, you are profoundly unlikely to have any meaningful effect on reality, and you are going to be constantly reminded of it by your culture. Fuck that noise.

Note that the "Blue" narrative in Parallax is basically the story of a Young Adult Novel Heroine who was handed the McGuffin by Special Elf People... and finds out in the first 8 pages it don't work so good. ^__^

(To make a more valuable and serious contribution here: I think what puts me off about HP is the innate elitism of its premise. 'Cause that's EXACTLY what puts me off about Doctor Who. You can't achieve Time Lord status. You have to be part of the Special Elf People race. I hate Special Elf People races. I like my weird supernormal genre fiction to be as democratic as possible. If I don't have ANY chance of growing up to punch gods in your world... hard pass. :) )

christ i fucking hate harry potter :)

you are neither bad nor wrong if you love harry potter and i still treasure you

i suspect there is a lot of really good stuff to be mined from any well-written and evocative fantasy series no matter how reflexively its premises may put some others off

and if it's any consolation if i actually read any of it it might evolve to something like, say, the deep love-hate i have of doctor who

but christ i fucking hate harry potter <3

(to "watching the detectives")

black scales, not one with a flaw
pearly white fangs inside her maw
red hair draped over serpent neck
her 13 hit dice are scary as heck

i'm sleeping with a dragon
it's not hard
to curl up with with a dragon
when she rawrs
rawrs
rawrs

Not sure if it's a #moodsnapshot, but I'd forgotten how goddamn cute this song is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX7BmWEJ5Dc

Hey, @acetone_kitten -- ignore the song and watch this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJpfK7l404I

Oh, forgive me: the above link is CW: Absolutely Everything A Medieval Person Could Possibly Think Is Funny.

Roll THAT concept around in your noggin for a second before you click. O_o;

I actually need to sit down and read some or all of Gargantua and Pantagruel. This is a much more charming list than I had anticipated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_works_in_Gargantua_and_Pantagruel

I just spend like five minutes making sure a baby spider didn't crawl inside my laptop and get itself in Bad Trouble. I got the little thing onto a toothpick, transferred it to a piece of paper, and set it down near my precious 3D statue of the Jackalope Mother. She's got a lot of cobwebbing in her antlers already, so I'm sure she can at least get her a meal and a safe place for the night. I feel a bit better about the world for some reason. Good luck, tiny spinner.

Meanwhile it's hard not to feel like Ptonomy's fate is a bit like a fridging and I'd kinda really really like for him to get out of the Fridgeframe by the end of the season at worst. Give the poor fucker at least a CHANCE to matter, okay?! He's so damn quiet, and RL experience tells me that means he's going to be the most interesting one when he finally goddamn talks. -_-

And honestly? It was also pretty cathartic seeing that Amy really could simultaneously be kind of an oppressive, patronizing shit to David AND be scared of him over things he really couldn't control AND genuinely love him and make heartbreaking sacrifices for him. David's suppressed resentment of her was valid, but she still deserved better than she got, and I understand that urge to still fight like hell for someone whose *genuine* last resort was to betray you.

Legion S02E06 was really difficult, and really cathartic, given the last year. Getting to see just how dysfunctional and dangerous David once was -- and could have been again, if he'd botched his self-care even WORSE -- and still getting to think of him as a basically good and valid and okay person afterwards. That was a story I really needed to see, and a reminder that a world where I am interesting *and* happy *and* never at all broken just might not exist.

In the same spirit, today's #moodsnapshot is just a whole bunch of Kraftwerk. Sterile emotionless technocratic modernism sounds intensely cozy today, especially if they still have good coffee and pastry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBjhHq6qp-k

New party game for 2020, where you go around in a circle naming various literary "dystopias" and the other players all vote on whether they'd rather live there or here. The more defectors you get to the society you named, the more points.

Losers have to join the winner's revolutionary cell and help bring about the winning society. Any player who consistently voted for Trump's America is send to Round 2, which bears an amazing resemblance to Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."

Or we could just put everyone from /r/TumblrInAction on an African island...

make a reality show where they explain what they learn once put in a position of disempowerment, promising all a safe return to America once they demonstrate their new wisdom...

let 'em learn harsh lessons in communication & tolerance as they're forced to work together & collaborate with dark-skinned people from other islands with all the power & resources...

Then bomb the island. 😺​

There's some piece of shit on Reddit spewing ethnonationalism bullshit about black IQs. Showing him Cosma Shalizi's debunking of the Bell Curve isn't working because of all the big words, so I'm thinking what I'd like to do is sedate him and then have him wake up in a roomful of black physicists in a cocktail jacket with a nice drink in his hand, and let him see how the whole "human intelligence" thing really shakes out for his no-punctuation-usin all-lowercase punk ass.