Abilities Considered Unnatural

The Twitter right appears to be doing an ancient Greek version of the usual "true manhood is driving your enemies before you with your sword" / "true manhood is getting on your knees for Jesus" dilemma, where Odysseus is like a war hero but also is getting dicked about by the gods. The woke left sometimes got its panties in a knot over female characters being weak in stories where everyone was weak, like Katniss is superficially badass but is a plaything of the system, but having a female protagonist of your "war is pretty shit" story is feminist in its own way. But then, I don't think the right would like a "war is pretty shit" story, for all they're fearmongering about the draft.

Pretty sure someone high up in the production of the Conan movies was really into horses. Like idk if there were being realistic but there's a lot of shots where you're meant to really enjoy those horses doing their thing. And like, obvs a lot of Western fantasy is going to have horses as a big deal, but this is very much not drawing on the knight-in-shining-armour tradition of cavalry is it? There's a decent amount of "Mongols are fucking cool" representation of mounted raiding parties, though...

To pile on all the shit wrong with me, I had a 24-hour stomach bug so nasty that a heaped teaspoon of vanilla yoghurt was a serious test. The only one of my prescription medications I expected to be able to keep down was the fucking weapons grade stimulant, because that is also precisely the one carefully formulated to be given to children. I mean, the way you're meant to do that is crush it into soft food to mask the disgusting taste, but food was a really bad idea so I just fucking lay there chewing it to make it dissolve faster in a mouthful of water. Like all stimulants I've attempted to put under the tongue or whatever, absolutely foul, but not as bad as stomach acid so that's a win.

My mother force-tomboyed me but was so British about it that I didn't come out anything like what Americans past like the 80s think a tomboy is. But real Australian men in the 2000s did understand the spirit that led us to follow a burning bush into the desert with no exit strategy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxkjc_9gT6o

To understand the state of the kind of American Protestant who isn't Talarico, you need to meditate on my piece of shit mother and her reading CS Lewis to my nascent kinky child-self But in her repression, she wouldn't even let me watch the Americans who were self-aware about their culture, and hence I never experienced true satire of 2000s American bloodlust. But Contrapoints, who like I grew up in Australia's Langley grew up in, well, America's Langley, and yet is technically vanilla, can bridge the gap. To explain the British version of crime and punishment to any American who isn't mogging me by actually reading Russian literature, I'd point to her Saw video. And she, she can get me all hard and ready to understand the prophetic vision for our age, Idiocracy. Thesis: Idiocracy is a documentary Antithesis: Idiocracy is a eugenicist parable Synthesis: what are you, fucking Catholic, stop pretending you watch anything on the History Channel that isn't about aliens even to mine it for cheap ammo; it's a documentary