Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

For the record, the guy mentioned in the above toot responded to me with a really, really stupid counterargument. He said "check your local library"-- as if his point were so self-evident, reading ANY book would support it, I guess?! (He was arguing that the basic purpose of the police is to protect society. His previous argument was "it MUST be true-- they swear an OATH to that effect!")

So I told him I was going to have to redact my blessing to just "winter holidays." O:)

It's pretty hilarious, the amount of intellectual contortion that Biblical scholars go through to convince themselves Song of Solomon 5:4 isn't about getting fisted.

my trollface when i deliberately sign off a parting shot to an arch-conservative with "happy winter holidays" :D

okay motherfucker i'm just gonna ruin your christmas with my rootless cosmopolitanism then

Mom launched into a 20-minute tirade, imho correctly, about how shitty my redneck stepfamily is (except for my stepbrother and stepdad, who are definitely still Ohio Guys, but genuinely really nice Ohio Guys).

I'm still laughing, especially about the part where she found out they were all exploiting my stepgrandfather's property, and she got to cancel their car insurance and electricity out from under them. It's a long story why Mom had control of them in the first place (keyword: "extreme ingratitude for tremendous emotional labor"), but she got off scot-free because they honestly thought they were ripping Grandpa off in secret.

I think I must have used the phrase "don't exactly see me playing devil's advocate here" about six times during our conversation. :)

Any day where the pro-Trump propaganda list I hate-read says "it's not looking good" is a fine day for democracy. :D

That moment you realize that your old neurological issues have NOT in fact come home to roost. You just haven't fucking eaten in roughly 18 hours because air travel totally mongs up your sense of routine.

I wish all my issues could be resolved with a huge bowl of Italian Wedding Soup.

(Fun fact: This stuff was never served at weddings until long after it was named. It's derived from "minestra maritata," where "maritata" [married] is just a metaphor for "mixed.")

My stepgrandfather has landed himself in the ER with a nasty, ulcerated case of colitis. He's 95. We are worried that if they have to perform surgery on him, he won't make it.

But it's not nearly as bad as it sounds. One, we're not really close. Two, he's been a macho twit about this condition for, like, 20 years. Three, he pretty much rebuffed all my mom's offers to help take care of him, in favor of his Favorite Granddaughter, who... is neither half as smart nor half as devoted as my mom. Four... he's kind of a reactionary crypto-racist asshole (and most likely was a Trump voter), though he's at least been nice enough to me.

This is mainly a matter of "shit, I hope he doesn't die over the holidays and break my stepdad's heart." His odds of making it are even pretty good so far. Surgery is just one scary possibility thus far. Frankly, to me, it's just One More Goddamn Thing, and one more reason to fret over my poor stepdad-- whom I *do* really like, and does not need this shit.

I love Anthracite so very much, but being able to work in complete and utter privacy and silence, without a distractible (albeit adorable) bohemian loon 10' away... That's feelin' pretty luxurious right now. :D

Living with Anthy again has been really good, better than I ever anticipated. But there are days I am seriously tempted to see how expensive, say, a decommissioned portapotty would be to set up in our living room. Something with enough room for a desktop shelf. Ideally, something that is perfectly soundproof.

OTOH, it is a fucking MIRACLE and speaks to how good Anthy is to me that I can even work with another sapient being in social-radar range at all...

Just a reminder: if you're trans, I have probably already retconned your current gender all the way back to being a baby, and will have to be reminded if you're referring to a Lost Timeline. :D

Unless, of course, you're @LeDiva, in which case I have you retconned all the way back to kittenhood. <3

"If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel full of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel full of wine... you get sewage." -- Schopenhauer's Law of Entropy

Culture hero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg4-YnLcSF0

(attn @LeDiva <3 )

Ever since Trump started his campaign, the Evil Sociologist in me has had a morbidly curious impulse.

It kind of wants to see Leftist Trump. It's desperately curious what would actually happen if a narcissistic and incompetent socialist, maybe even an outright Leninist, got into office.

Would we fall prey to our own equivalent cognitive glitches? Could we become a cult of personality, too? Could we run a line of bullshit equivalent to the Birther conspiracy or Pizzagate?

I genuinely do not know. Our resilience against Trump's gaslighting has been pretty encouraging... but then, he offers us nothing good at all, so where was the challenge?

I've seen some pretty massive leaps of logic from our side during this mess. They've scared me sometimes. But it's so hard to judge them, especially in an environ this surreal, where the gaslighting has been so constant.

Could *our* madness just be a side effect of dealing with *their* madness, something that will heal up if our opponents just stop fucking with our information stream?

For instance, I'm still embarrassed to say, when my friends started insisting most of Trump's online support was coming from bots, I thought they were just dehumanizing the enemy. I was dead wrong on that one. Sometimes paranoia is the correct and factual response.

But I still wonder. Is there really something fundamentally different about us? Is this a conservative problem or a human problem? What exactly *would* it take to turn Us into Them? Could one bad agent, taking advantage of our own tendency to see ourselves as the Good Rational Ones, turn us into a personality cult?

My Inner Evil Sociologist can go fuck themself, 'cause this is not an experiment I want to see performed. I'm content to just leave this shit in the vault and never have to know.

I feel like more people should have heard of this woman. I sure hadn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Bassi

HOCHHEILIGEFLIEGENDEKINDERSCHEISS

(Everything is fine, I just felt the need to utter the foulest curse in Discordian practice at the world in general. In case you're too lazy for Google Translate, it means something like "high holy flying baby shit." :p )

home safe in ohio <3

@anthracite

"I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them." -- Andy Bernard

The thing I hate most about travel is all the time it gives me to brood. Heart was a little fluttery on the flight -- probably just vagus nerve bullshit, but it got me thinking about death and loss.

I've had enough loss this year, dammit. I'm tired of everything feeling poignant and fraught all the time. I'm tired of feeling for the first time in 20 years like I'm totally adrift, with very few really close friends who will still bother to seek me out, and no safety net whatsoever if I fuck something up.

I'm tired of questioning myself and my basic decency every day. I'm tired of facing down a lifetime of precarity, where if I lose Peg I lose everything. I'm tired of thinking about the inevitability of losing my mom. I'm tired of simultaneously missing Kristy and Jessie *and* looking forward to never dealing with them and their aloofness again. I'm tired of knowing that when I go, most people probably won't much notice or care, in a place where I could have sworn I had tons of friends and a community the last time I looked.

I'm just tired. I'm glad I'm heading home, because I really needed this break. I wish I felt like I had *some* semblance of a home that didn't feel like it was slowly dwindling into nothing. I wish Rik and I hung out more. I wish I saw my remaining sisters, like, ever. I wish Seattle could ever feel like home again. I wish I could ever hope to have two people to cuddle in bed at once again. Most of all, I wish I could get a real hug right about now.

Thanks for listening, if anybody did. I'm sorry I didn't do better. I'll be okay.

Feeling weird and ghostly and alone, which is to say, I'm having perfectly normal and healthy emotions for an airport.

This kid has really good mlem technique. I feel like I learned a lot from this video. It's good to see some new ideas in tongue work.

https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/a738zn/being_a_kitten_is_tough/

I found this textfile on my desktop.

I don't remember writing it.

I think it might have been written sometime between the day I bought that bottle of tequila and the day I emptied that bottle of tequila. Some amount of kelp may have also been involved in its production.

For the record, @anthracite immediately insisted on performing a dramatic reading of the entire document. :D