All series featured on this blog have their masterlists posted here! This is a master post of master posts! A master-masterpost. A masterpostception, if you will.
Side note it is Baelpenrose policy regarding shipping conundrums that all characters within stories on this blog are canonically either bisexual or asexual unless cannon decrees otherwise.
Edit YET AGAIN: I am always available on the Archive of Our Own, linked below. Tumblr’s increasing attempts to retire itself from relevance to bend over for Apple make it increasingly relevant to support Ao3. I will continue updating here, naturally, however, should I ever up and vanish, come find me there under the same username.
Final Forward: While I have written all of these, and am not ASHAMED of any of them, I have grown significantly enough as a writer and as a person since time of writing that I do not believe that Tiger Squadron is terribly reflective of the writer (or human being) that I am now, and encourage people to read my other stuff first, then go back to it if they want to get an idea of how I started.
LEGAL DISCLAIMER: No character in the following works is based off a real, living person with the exception of fan submissions, some of which are based off the fans submitting them. All other resemblances to living people is purely coincidental. Resemblance or reference to deceased historical figures, however, is usually on purpose.
Afterverse Studios Staff Announcement:
Afterverse Studios Staff, Writing Team, Beta Readers, etc
Beta-reading Policy
Tiger Squadron Universe:
Campy military sci-fi written for "humans are space orcs" - my first ever written works.
Original Series. (Complete!)
Next Generation (Complete!)
The Healing Earth:
Solarpunk fiction reflecting on humanity, government, religion, anti-capitalism, and possibilities for post-colonial life.
Arcadian Inquisition: Adept (Complete)
Nihilus Rex: Ongoing (Prequel series) (On Hiatus)
The Miys (Partner Series by CanyouheartheLight) (Complete!)
From the Ashes (Forthcoming) - Founder Era story
Under Avandra’s Eyes Series!
Sword and Sorcery fiction dealing with themes of trauma, healing, justice, found family, and coming-of-age.
Under Avandra’s Eyes Book 1: Companions of Torin pt I (Complete)
Under Avandra’s Eyes Book 1: Companions of Torin Pt II (Complete, very much meant to be read as one book with the previous link, split because Tumblr only allows up to 100 links on a given post)
Under Avandra’s Eyes Book 2: Exile’s Path (In Progress!)
Under Avandra’s Eyes Book 3: Netherworld's Reckoning (Forthcoming)
Project Praetorian Series:
Science fiction dealing with themes of trauma, colonialism, and the challenge of complicity vs. agency.
Phase 1: The Project (Complete)
Phase 2: The Invasion (Forthcoming)
Phase 3: The Last Gambit (Forthcoming)
Phase 4: the Aftermath (forthcoming)
Masterpost-ception by CanyouheartheLight (included here as both partner author and frequently cross-promoted. Also because her Miys series is part of the Afterverse)
And if you’re the type who would rather binge via Ao3....
Enjoy!
And support the ongoing madness on Ko-fi if you wish!
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I've read a few recently published books, and there's this recurring pattern where if anyone does anything bad and interesting, they have to later talk about it in a way that makes it clear that it was a misunderstanding/ justified/ not their fault, so they're still a good person. and if they have a disagreement with another character, they have to therapy talk it out, regardless of their background. it doesn't matter if this is a street urchin with three teeth who just stabbed and kidnapped someone, you will get eloquent sterile therapy speak that will smooth out any possible emotional tension. and everyone asks for permission before they kiss, and waits for a clear enthusiastic yes. again, doesn't matter the character's background or situation, they will ask "can I please kiss you," because if they didn't, that could get all yucky and uncertain, couldn't it? and if a character is from a rich family, they will hate being in a rich family, and hate wealth signifiers, and actually be all for class equality. and everyone is casually queer, without thought being put into how that would mesh with the society that is being described. like yes, this is violent class-based system obsessed with inheritance, but no, it's not actually a problem that the child they've coldly groomed to take on the family mantle is unwilling to beget an heir because of gay. the parents might be terrible, cruel and fascistic, but they're not homophobic! I don't know, it just seems like EVERYTHING that could actually be messy gets sanded and sanded until it's smooth as a shark, but the Fun Violence is allowed to stay, because bloodshed doesn't actually bother anyone or have any consequence apart from your rogue character shrugging and going oops, was that me? the rogue is still a good person though. if you think they're not, just wait for the two solid pages of introspection. and yes they started the book by slitting two throats, but that was fine. they will ask permission before hugging you.
There are many reasons for this that are braided together, but I'm going to be bold and say it: I think a lot of this has to do with rising illiteracy.
I just read a Fortune article the other day about the fact that some college students can't read a single sentence. One. They cannot parse the meaning of a single sentence. That's terrifying. (Here it is on Yahoo without the paywall, btw.)
The thing is that you do not have to be wholly illiterate to struggle with reading. About half of Americans have low literacy, meaning they read around a sixth grade level or less.
This puts publishers in a terrible position. They need to sell books to an audience that cannot read books made for adults but that doesn't want the simplicity of grade-school books. The books need real adult problems without the nuance, hence the therapy speak and the black-and-white thinking.
Another thing is that cognitive flexibility influences literacy, meaning the reverse is also true; cognitive inflexibility determines lower literacy. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to update your schemas or combine multiple pieces of information without being expressly told to do so. It also impacts whether you can identify the mismatch between what someone says and what they do, which is the gold standard way to avoid therapy speak.
Poor cognitive flexibility means you can't have messy situations, because then the reader doesn't know what to think. Everyone has to be sorted into Good Person and Bad Person, and if the Good Person does something that may seem Bad, then they become a Bad Person unless the text assures us that they are still Good.
You will see many positive Goodreads reviews for these books. I'm not saying every single person with a positive review for a book like that has low literacy, but it's more likely than not. The same thing that drives you insane is what compels other readers who can't handle more complex texts.
Basically what I am saying is that if you want something with nuance, as a reader or a writer, you probably need to seek out selfpub stuff. I know that a lot of selfpub is garbage specifically because of the lower barrier to entry, and a lot of good selfpub stuff is not highly rated because getting reviews takes time and energy.
(I'd like to say my own stuff is good but doesn't have a lot of reviews because that requires active solicitation and I'm busy. I'm competing with millions of authors, both selfpub and tradpub, who have larger budgets. Anyway.)
Still, if you go sifting, ask for recommendations, and follow selfpub authors, you're likely to find more complex work that was not brutalized to fit the lowest common denominator.
I know that being involved in a hobby whose primary demographic is middle class white people is going to put me at risk of being exposed to folk with noxious opinions, even more so when most official communication is through facebook which is itself a notorious cesspit of people's bad opinions. Still I find it jarring when I am subjected to open racism from people in my community. I try to block people when I can, as I truly don't believe having internet arguments is a good way of accomplishing much of anything. That said, I feel the need to convey that racism and xenophobia are not values I share, so let me say it plain.
I love migrants.
My world is better for having migrants in it.
The "West" is not nor ever has been real. But migrants? They are real and they are my friends and family and neighbours. If you disagree, then you are not my friend and you are not my ally and you do not share my values. If we as a community claim to value honour and grace, then we must stand with the most vulnerable members of our community. To do otherwise is cowardice.
“For example, if you’re trying to convince people to boycott a segregated store, your object is to convince them that boycotting the store will have a strategic effect, not that desegregation is morally important. For whatever reason, on a cognitive level human beings have a really hard time with this. Smucker cites an example of a Lefty roleplaying session where people were tasked with selling an action to people who agreed with them on principle but didn’t see the strategic merit of the action. Surprisingly, the sellers couldn’t make the conceptual switch to sell strategic merit: instead, they doubled down on THIS ISSUE IS IMPORTANT — even though it had been stressed to them that the people they were selling to bought into the importance of the issue. People react poorly to “this is important, so do WHATEVER I SAY”; they want to be convinced that what you’re proposing will work.”
“Bob Wing, a grassroots organizer, explains this nicely: “If winning feels impossible, then righteousness can seem like the next best thing.” But righteousness is not conducive to getting normies to join your team if your team cannot demonstrate ability to, at least sometimes, win. Nor does righteousness help you make real inroads with regular people.”
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It's interesting seeing established artists who've made the jump to AI optimise and refine their prompts to better satisfy the Algorithm until every single image has exactly the same vibe, then become genuinely mystified when people get bored and leave. It's like watching a human being experience model collapse.
Just so we're clear:
The Jedi are based, per both their practices and in-universe beliefs, on a mix of Buddist/Taoist views on destiny, enlightenment, morality, and meditation/emotional regulation. They have a small amount of the New Age/Wiccan/Neopagan views on everyone being 'one' in spirit that got mixed into Western understanding of those religions when those religions got popular in America during the 1960s countercultural movement when George Lucas first encountered them.
if you are writing them as colonizing or Christian/catholic coded, you fundamentally misunderstand what they are, and you have limited/no religious literacy.
The Sith are a death cult based on, in order of prominence in their actual, in-universe beliefs, the Volk-Cult of the Nazi party, the bastardized "imperial" shintoism that no shintoist acknowledges as legitimate and was only ever adopted by the Japanese Empire between 1910-1945, Neitzhean post-theist nihilism, and (if you squint) the Calvinist "elect" theology that Lucas wrote star wars as a rebellion against in the backdrop of American counterculture and its conservative backlash.
If you write the Sith as a pro-queer, feminist, oppressed minority faith, you are fundamentally misunderstanding what they are, you have no religious literacy, and you should be embarrassed.
Lookin' at you, Leslie Headland. Also at the fandom
“For example, if you’re trying to convince people to boycott a segregated store, your object is to convince them that boycotting the store will have a strategic effect, not that desegregation is morally important. For whatever reason, on a cognitive level human beings have a really hard time with this. Smucker cites an example of a Lefty roleplaying session where people were tasked with selling an action to people who agreed with them on principle but didn’t see the strategic merit of the action. Surprisingly, the sellers couldn’t make the conceptual switch to sell strategic merit: instead, they doubled down on THIS ISSUE IS IMPORTANT — even though it had been stressed to them that the people they were selling to bought into the importance of the issue. People react poorly to “this is important, so do WHATEVER I SAY”; they want to be convinced that what you’re proposing will work.”
“Bob Wing, a grassroots organizer, explains this nicely: “If winning feels impossible, then righteousness can seem like the next best thing.” But righteousness is not conducive to getting normies to join your team if your team cannot demonstrate ability to, at least sometimes, win. Nor does righteousness help you make real inroads with regular people.”
The reason most indie novels are written like the author is terrified of doing something wrong is because the overwhelming majority of indie novelists get their start by networking in the violent panopticon of the social media indie publishing community, which favours the people who are able to win at the social policing game.
I had heard of the whole messed up situation with this story, but I hadn't ever read the synopsis of the story before, and WOW
This story sounds like it could have been a brilliant exploration of gender and warfare and violence but instead it was attacked by people who didn't know how to confront a story that made them uncomfortable, and the author faced horrible consequences.
It's so important to be able to deal with stories that give you uncomfortable feelings in other ways than just attacking it. Being shown new perspectives sometimes has feelings of discomfort because it's an unfamiliar way of seeing the world.
Isabel Fall alluded to Nazi concepts in an edgy ambiguous Nazisploitation aesthetic that, if you read it in good faith, you could tell was ultimately in subversion of those concepts. However, the general sentiment of edgy South Parkian ambiguity caused the hypersensitive leftist critics to read her as a Nazi as a baseline assumption. It's the same phenomenon as The Boys viewers reading the (very Jewish) show as Nazi because of the presence of a likable Nazi character. Any attempt to put the brakes on it has everyone scrutinizing you as a Nazi, so the most extreme voices intimidate the rest into staying quiet.
When the detail that the writer was a trans woman (and a specific one people knew) had filtered into common knowledge, the consensus of the vocal detractors was that she had done Nazi actions equivalent to being a Nazi that hurt every trans woman, and it was their responsibility to terrorize her. When she ended up suicidal and swore off writing, that was viewed as a great victory against an enemy of trans women. (Not dissimilar from people harassing Jewish actress Aya Cash for portraying a Nazi on The Boys.)
Also, people like to single out N.K. Jemisin for participating, but she was pretty much doing what people expect of an ally: following the leading voices of the relevant minority, repeating their messages, and using her social capital to boost theirs. The problem was the trans women leading the mob. I find the presence of trans woman author Alexandra Erin more objectionable because she was run off Tumblr for being into vore and bondage and because she liked a post from a black submissive woman showing off a collar, which was framed as her wanting to enslave black people, so you would think she'd be sympathetic to a trans woman author stigmatized for being into edgy humor. Instead, she likened the story to firing randomly in the air and hoping only bad people would be hurt, when it should be clear innocents would likely be hurt, making the whole endeavor harmful. (Like being open about liking controversial fetishes on Tumblr?)
Edgy humor sets off mainstream leftists like Daleks sighting an enemy.
And there is some reason to say NK Jemisin was doing what people expect from an ally, but if this was the result, maybe it’s time we actually think about that a little.
Like, how many times can we see a marginalized creator get torn to bloody shreds by other marginalized people and well intended “Allies” who never actually looked at the evidence themselves and just went off what “the affected group” was saying? The queer experience is subjective as hell, and I can’t imagine any other marginalized experience is different. Maybe we should stop mob harassing people for making something without looking at the thing ourselves.
And it’s fine if you don’t want to look at a thing, but at this point I think we need to bring back the old rule that if you haven’t seen/read something, you ought to just not talk about it at all and admit you don’t know anything about the subject.
Because here's the other thing? The people who did this to Ms. Fall? Entirely other progs/lefties/libs. Not a single conservative was involved. It was all lefties attacking our own.
You will never see this happen to a more 'conservative' or even 'apolitical' (read: written by a white man from a white man's perspective) indie novel, because those perspectives aren't hounded like a transfem's are. They aren't expected to be perfect the way a transfem's are. By engaging in harassment campaigns like this, you are purely and totally making it harder for marginalized people to publish, because at the end of the day, they are the ones who lose their social support networks to harassment campaigns by the terminally online, while the mediocre white dude can just fucking ignore anything the twitter mob says.
Tumblr is the ultimate platform to get completely blackpilled on the possibilities of a better future.
Why? Because many many people on here seem to believe they’re radical or progressive, but they simply do not want to give up their little bigotries and indiscriminate hostilities based on generalised personal gripes and grudges.
They genuinely think their demographic alone is truly oppressed and anyone else is privileged therefore is oppressing them.
And they do not care about blowing up solidarity and coalition before it has even been started. They simply want to feel better than other people based on being the underdog, the one truly oppressed minority.
And that is why I am so suspicious of discourse on this site. So much of it comes from exactly this place, this radicalism as callousness kind of shit. And material concerns are just completely overshadowed by this need to be first in the oppression Olympics and disqualify millions of people from solidarity, empathy or inclusion cause they are just the wrong gender, ethnicity, class etc.
Do not let tumblr dictate your attitude towards real life people or you will be as fanatical and cruel as MAGA chuds. If your leftism isn’t based on wanting a universal emancipation then you are an active danger to real positive change.
If your hatred is more important than your love or a stranger’s humanity, you are no one’s ally.
tbh so much of it is personal grudges about fandom bullshit that's being dressed up as actual social justice language. And it is absolutely not the way to model your ideas of how to build a better world.
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Under Avandra's Eyes II: Exile's Path
Chapter LVI: The Talk
The team sits down and discusses what, exactly, was done to Itene by Vixen. Apologies for the posting delay, I'm currently hanging out, IN PERSON, with both @canyouhearthelight and @writing-with-olive. Wild experience, last time Light and I were in person together was my wedding and yesterday was the first time Olive and I met in the flesh.
Itene
I was finally getting answers. I knew I'd been bathed in Chaos, I knew I had been used as a curse mommet and then the process of purifying it the specific way Vixen had done it - or perhaps the way she'd used me to absorb curses - had infused me with the ability to do some kind of magic.
What I didn't know was why the Regent had felt so personally enraged by my existence. What that had been about.
"So. What did Vixen tell you about Chaos? Its actual nature, I mean?"
I thought. "She said it was made up of all emotions, all thoughts, dreams, nightmares, hopes, dreads. Of everyone. That our 'better angels' and 'personal daemons' were literal there."
Neith let out a coughing bark of suprise. "That is far more honest than I'd ever have expected her to be. So. You know what Baldor and I have taught you of the gods, and your mother has taught you of the old legends, I assume. So, let's talk about the Regent. What Iris did, at that battle, was a feat of instinctive, Khym based Necromancy that forced the soul of a harbinger back into its body."
I blinked. Iris blanched. "I thought necromancy didn't actually pull souls back?"
Neith wavered a hand. "Not…intact, no. Not mortal souls, anyway. A Harbinger soul though - they're already tampered with by magics I don't want to describe, so they're a little more able to make the journey back, you just have to be terrifyingly strong to do it. The problem is, to host a Harbinger Mantle, a body itself has to be changed - there's a metaphysical part of you that your soul vacates on death, and shoving a soul back in it after it's been altered to hold the kind of ruinous power that makes up a Harbinger Mantle…Iris, you basically caused a tiny Judgement inside that poor bastard's body."
Iris whistled. I felt confused. "Right, but what about the Regent?"
Liza spoke up then. "Uh…so. The Judgement…it let Chaos loose on the world. If Iris caused a tiny one, then we all experienced chaos for a moment there. Whatever happened…"
"Was something only replicable in the midst of Chaos. You're describing hearing the Regent's thoughts. That means that some kind of channel opened between the two of you. It would only have done that if whatever was done to you had made your spirit similar to his, not in a moral sense but in the sense of having been treated in a ritually similar way."
I paused. "So…he went through something similar?"
Liza paused. "He did say something about that. The first time I met with him, disguised. He said that he was sent to the Cathedral as a child, and that they'd 'done things to him.' He didn't say much more than that, but I didn't dare ask. Would have given me away, and even beyond that, I didn't want to know."
Neith snorted. "Malzan and I have dealt with the Cathedral before. Knowing them….well, say simply that Itene was the lucky one to be in Vixen's hands, not theirs."
Marcus butted in. "What are the Cathedral? Their iron-clad champions seemed different than Pikar berserkers."
"They're Ruin cultists, but ones with a much more complex theology and set of rituals than people who have simply fallen. It's nothing more complicated than that. Anyway. For the Regent to have been changed by them, they probably did some truly heinous things to him."
I had to shudder at that thought - if Vixen looked mild by comparison. "So why does that make us similar?"
"Because what Vixen did to you is still incredibly dark. You said you were called a curse mommet, correct?"
I nodded.
"Right. That's something from the Book of the Fallen. I believe one of the Arihmans came up with that particular ritual, but I could be wrong. It's VERY dark magic, Itene. Vixen was dancing with daemons to be pushing you through that process - almost literally. You were exposed to some of the darkest entities in Chaos in that process, just with greater protection than the Regent had if he was worked on by the Cathedral."
Liza paused. "Wait. now I have a question. You say she connected with him in Chaos. Can Chaos do that without any will directing it?"
Neith winced. "Understand, my knowledge of this is not complete, and I am primarily a priestess and healer. However, as far as I know, the only way that could be naturally occurring is if there was a connection that was already bound directly in the domains of one of the gods. Now, for all that the Cathedral dices with incredibly powerful and dark forces, they actually don't do anything that might have bound him to any other person. The only god I can think of that this could be tied to is Avandra, especially since she's the goddess of Fate. And…"
I felt the enormity of it hit me, like a burst of intuition. "that's what he meant, isn't it? Vixen, the Fateweaver. She bound me and the Regent. She wanted to make something to counter him, so she bound me to him. Knowing that it would put all of us on a collision course with him."
Neith spoke, too softly. "If…if any of what we've talked about so far is correct, then…yes. Vixen inexorably bound you to the Regent, which in turn means all of us cannot escape him. Even if his sense of vengeance for his city and his son would not drive him to us, that force eventually will. And we will face him again."
I remembered the impossibility of facing him. HIs speed, strength, technique, magic I couldn't understand, or counter. "How are we supposed to fight that?"
Baldor spoke, finally. "We aren't. Fighting it is not enough. We are supposed to conquer that. You wanted adventure, Itene. You have one. The Regent of Sargomia is our enemy."
Liza swore. "Vixen bound my daughter to kill that thing? I don't know how we could. Marcus and Thomas couldn't out-fence him, and you say that his magic is drawn from sources even the Cathedral is afraid to touch. How are we supposed to take that on?"
"Every beast immortal, until someone figures out how to slay it.'" Malzan said, with the cadence of an old quote. Marcus idly slapped his shield, with the casual bravado of a soldier used to facing odds he didn't like and coming out alive.
Thomas grunted. "I don't think vixen knew. But awful as she was, I don't think she made plans she meant to fail. If she believed that we couldn't do it, she wouldn't have set us up to have to face it."
"Vixen's dead. It's possible she was outplayed." Liza spoke the obvious.
"Maybe. But it's also possible she felt there was no way out that got what she wanted. She may not have been so attached to her own life as you suppose. If she saw the Regent as a big enough problem, she may well have been willing to die to counter it, especially if she knew she couldn't ever face him and win." Neith answered with a shrug.
Itene paused. "So, I'm still a little confused. You said the Cathedral tuaght him magic, but then you said based on what he was doing, he was pulling power from places in Chaos even the Cathedral was afraid to draw from. How is that possible?"
Liza paused as Neith looked lost. "The old tales might answer that. I don't know what the truth is, but the ancient magi supposedly could do quite a bit more than modern arcanists. It's very possible that as your powers deepen, you'll understand things Vixen never did, intuitively. That said, I would be…very concerned about you dabbling in the kind of power that the Regent does. I'm not refusing to talk about what he's doing because I don't want to. I actually only suspect, and there are only myths to suggest answers. None of them have names. Supposedly, there are, as Neith says, things with no names that one can deal with, can draw from. FOr him to get power from that…"
Baldor rumbled for the first time. "My sheild caught fire when he threw power at it. Why? If I'm supposed to be proof against magic, how does he manage that?"
I had wondered that, and Mama's voice came, almost as a whisper. "Because, if he's doing what we suspect, the normal rules don't apply to him. There's almost no restriction that you can think of that does. He is still mortal - in so far as if he is wounded badly enough, he will probably die, but I don't know what kind of brutality it would take to actually slay him. Between Marcus and Thomas, I think he took enough of a punishment to kill a common man three or four times…"
Thomas shook his head. "True enough, but assuming he could ignore the pain that would have debilitated a common man, he wouldn't have died quickly. Provided he can heal himself with magic, staggering into Chaos to heal might be all he needs. Those wounds could well have been mortal for him had he not escaped."
I nodded, snapping on that. "His mind. He didn't flee because he thought he was winning. He thought that he'd die if he didn't run, he just thought he'd take us all with him, so he fled, assuming we'd die and he'd come back another day to hunt down whoever survived."
I dug my fingers into the ground and etched some of the glyphys I'd seen burning behind my eyes in our fighting, and had seen again after purging the curses from Neva. Neith hissed out a curse. "Child. Are you mad? Scratch that out!" Such was the urgency of her voice that I never thought of doing otherwise. By the time I was done, I could smell brimstone, and there was heat rising from the glyphs, with the stony earth blackening as I scratched out the symbols I'd scrawled n the dirt. I looked to Neith.
"Those are names that you were etching, ones you don't want to write, names of things whose attnetion you don't want."
I looked at her and actually thought about the glyphs - and then drew my chimes out, and ran out into the wind. I was tired, I was tired of everyone telling me to wait, telling me that I could wait for answers. If I was going to be destined to go up against the Regent, I needed to be strong enough to face answers myself. To find answers for myself.
The wind kicked up as I held the chimes out into the wind, clearing my mind, even as Neith, Liza, Iris, and Baldor all rose to their feet. They all suddenly felt very far away, though - and suddenly, as through a wall of ice, or transparent sap, I could see a pair of amber eyes glowing with malevolence and burning like hellfire, burning into my mind. The pressure of it hit me like a physical blow, and forced me to my knees, and I could feel something claw through my mind. Something trickled down the corners of my eyes, but i got an idea of what this was - it had witnessed the judgement of Sargomia. It had watched the fear of my friends when they'd gone to the blasted lands - and while its body was still imprisoned there, it's mind was more free to wander now.
And it was animated by a hate like nothing mortal. Hatred for me, for being alive and daring to know it. Even worse hatred for the Regent, for being Sargomian and existing. It wanted to finish what it started. This was the Judgement. This was what Vixen had bound me to, one of the Nameless things that lived in Chaos.
I couldn't breathe. I heard, as though through a long tunnel, the screams of my family. I grabbed the phial off my belt and crawled towards the cave entrance, towards the eyes, and began spasming from the dread that made my chest sieze. The fear enveloped my mind, and I forced myself to move forward, knowing that I was as far from this thing as an insect is to a human, to a bear, to a god. But I reached the rain, and the phial, held the phial up…
And with all the will I could focus, I channeled water magic to break my own spell and suddenly the eyes vanished. I started throwing up, seeing bear meat on the ground - that had somehow regrown hair in my stomach. It was speckled with blood, and I was dizzy with what I had seen. The horrible pressure in my mind was gone, and I tried to breathe for retching, and Liza and Baldor held me and yelled at me for my foolishness.
"I saw it." I gasped. "I saw the Judgement. I know what Vixen bound me to. And I think I know what to…I think I have an idea of what Vixen's plan was. I just…I don't know it's going to work."
Boo hoo i'll be able to add more physical storage to my phone and be able to change out batteries if they degrade as well as all these other optional features I won't have to touch
I love how they add totally absurd things no one is asking for to make the idea look crazy. And still, I must emphasize, failing to make this look like a bad idea.
"Is this what you want? Is this ugly stupid bullcrap what you want??" the biggest loudest idiot in the room asks, holding up a picture of the hottest looking shit I've ever seen
“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.
I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.
And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.
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At the end of the day, 99% of bad behavior in fandom towards marginalized indie creators by marginalized fans is basically the same psychological dysfunction.
Society fucking sucks. You cannot meaningfully punish the people who make society suck, the ones with real power. But you want to see something bleed for how much the world sucks and hey, that guy over there who has an audience is marginally successful and marginally influential (not in any material way. They just have followers on Twitter.) but you can hit them and make them bleed, which you couldn’t for the people who actually make your life suck.
So you constantly hammer on them for any mistake or fuckup you can find, no matter how far back, because it gives you some kind of feeling of control over how much life sucks and how little it’s helping.
They are people, tho. And it isn’t helping. You’re just making life worse for other people and not improving yours in any way.
aint it crazy how many people realize they're queer when they have the language to express how they feel and a support system to encourage self exploration????
right at the beginning when she's like how do I help my son feel loved and accepted I'm here shouting
"QUEEN YOU ALREADY DID THAT BY TAKING HIS SIDE AND LEAVING THAT NO GOOD HUSBAND FOR HAVING THE AUDACITY TO KICK YOUR BABY OUT!"
And Good for her! this is the only response to a man who kicks out a child.
