the zoe girl

I used to set this one for second year undergraduate creative writing seminars on writing science fiction on a double bill with Octavia E. Butler's "Bloodchild" and no-one here gets out alive.

I paused the robot vacuum so I could listen to this 1950’s story predicting the robot vacuum.

i fking hate the way this guy plays toys man. picks up a firetruck and says we're all firefighters which like that's fine as a start but then the setting he chooses is literally just like a suburban home with a married couple and kids inside and nothing else, lil bro was granted the precious freedom to be anyone and to live out any fantasy in a brief respite from our daily lives and he contrives a scenario in which we are called up to rescue the property of petty bourgeois hitlerites

then we're all pouring buckets (???) of water one by one on a raging house fire even though we came to this unsubtly implied to be pastoral white neighborhood in a literal firetruck like see i would not protest the employment of the ultra-real during playtime, in fact i more than welcome it when executed thoughtfully, but what calvin unconsciously strives towards is not so much realism as it is the hijacking of signs and symbols one encounters incidentally in reality, while shedding any concerns toward the material circumstances which bely them. by plastering over the glaring contradictions of the present historical moment with milquetoast platitudes, all the while fashioning itself as a simplified but ultimately faithful reproduction of what is real, such play in fact ranks among the most far flung of fantasies, but only due to its near-comical inability to recognize itself as such. this is nothing else but the worldview of craven liberalism, where neither scientific rigor nor whimsy can escape a sure and swift death, leaving only a familiar, yet false to the point of absurdity, caricature of the mundane, as if drawn by a little baby who cannot even hold a crayon normally

fuck, marry, kill: the wound that won’t heal, the past you can’t undo, the ghost that keeps returning

Yesterday I overheard a trans woman saying to another "the fourth law of robotics is that the robot has to be gay and trans" and a cis guy nearby going "oh what? I only know the first three" and her repeating "yeah it says the robot has to be gay and trans. Asimov wrote that" and him earnestly saying "whoa I didn't know that!"

It remains funny that John Wick's code name is Baba Yaga and they claim it means the Boogeyman. It's like he was called The Wicked Witch of the West, "the ultimate slasher villain."

I would, to be fair, be pretty intimidated by an Italian hit man who proudly used the code name Strega Nona

I bet in this universe the previous greatest assassin of all time, who looked suspiciously like he was being played by Toshiro Mifune, had the code name Onibaba