funny

my friend you caught me in a good mood (and happened to mention one of these posts that’s by a friend of mine and i feel warmly towards it despite what i just said) so i want to drop a short list of books you might like if you feel like You Can’t Kill Me In A Way That Matters/You Fungal Piece Of Shit can’t be replicated in “serious” literature!

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

The Cipher by Kathe Koja

The Beauty by Aliyah Whiteley

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

John Dies At The End by Jason Pargin

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Bunny by Mona Awad

The King In Yellow by Robert W. Chambers

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

The torturer stepped back instinctively. Not out of mercy. Out of surprise. The prisoner laughed. Not loudly. Worse than loudly. Softly. Like he had just remembered a private joke older than civilization.

“You still think pain is a language,” he said.

Another blow. This time across the mouth. Teeth cracked. Blood sheeted down his chin in long ribbons.

The interrogator hissed through clenched teeth. “Tell me where God went.”

The prisoner turned his head slowly. There was blood in his smile now.

“There are organisms,” he said, “living beneath Antarctic ice that have never seen the sun and have still learned how to eat.”

The room had gone very still. Somewhere in the dark, machinery groaned.

The interrogator grabbed him by the jaw hard enough to bruise bone.

“You think this makes you immortal?”

The prisoner spat a clot of red onto the floor between them.

“No,” he whispered.

“I think it makes you temporary.”

The torches flickered.

For one impossible second, the interrogator became aware of his own pulse. The heat in his veins. The soft wetness of his eyes. The damp animal electricity inside every living thing. The prisoner watched realization bloom across his face and smiled wider, blood running between his teeth.

“You cannot threaten a creature from the dirt,” he said, “with returning to the dirt.”

I am visibly Trans and I experience transphobia on a regular basis. I have never once been misgendered or made to feel uncomfortable by a member of my Jewish community.

I am visibly Jewish and I experience anti-Judaism on a regular basis. I am consistently devalued, shunned, and othered by Queer people in Queer spaces and Queer communities because of my Jewish identity.

Antitheists of color/from non-Christian backgrounds don’t exist and all atheists are white! Queerphobia doesn’t exist in Jewish spaces-especially Orthodox ones!

"I have experienced far more antisemitism in queer spaces than queerphobia in Jewish spaces" does not mean "queerphobia doesn't exist in any Jewish space ever."

Cultural genocide is excusable by simply writing off all "religion" as inherently reactionary. Rather than try to engage with religion as a potential venue for community organizing, it is labeled inherently hostile and of course this always comes down strongest on already minority/marginalized religion.

It's also important to consider that the "religion is anti-communist" conception came about as a result of European theory at a time where religion was already being sectioned off from the rest of culture in a way that has never been universal. It is simply not the case that "religion" is some ahistorical category that can be easily cut out from the rest of culture and blamed for all of the problems with society. The problems with religion are the problems of human culture in general, the problems with organized religion are the problems of organizing human culture and society. If your solution to the problem of culture being used to reinforce capitalist ideology is "just force people to give up the Bad Thing and then everyone will live in harmony!"

There is a population of working class church going grandmas who are deeply invested in their community, often through their religion, and have a lot of strong values (also often tied to their religion) that could easily align with leftism if they don't already. And leftists keep shooting themselves in the foot by alienating this and similar groups of people, who would benefit greatly and could benefit a movement a lot. If you can't possibly fucking figure out how to pick up any of the many many resources on communist/ anarchist/anti-capitalist approaches to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any other religion, that's a skill issue.

you're racist and think there's no way racialized students could write an essay this good

you need to decrease your class average because it's the end of the semester and you haven't met your target average

one of your TAs gave out too many As and you don't want to regrade anything

you haven't redesigned your course in years and students have gotten advice on how to write their essay from past students

you're pissed off at a student with disability accommodations for making you do extra work

you want to feel powerful

you got into a fight with your wife

you want to bond with other professors over how lazy kids are these days and swap juicy stories about students crying in your office

some other gems from fisk bot

and my personal all-time favourite: