It's got the rats!

3-5 turkey vultures will soon be dispatched to your location.

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.” Ursula K. Le Guin "American SF and The Other" in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975.

I want to write something scary but I don't know if the things that I find scary would make a good horror story.

Part of it is that this feels very unoriginal. "wooooo, capitalism scary!" yeah. we get it.

it's bartleby the scrivener and metamorphosis and prometheus and omelas. "the system eats people. duh."

The horror in the story is that nobody in the story notices the horror. This is simply life. This is the way things are. You come home from work and wash the smell of iron out of your hair before you rush downtown to meet that cute guy from the bar for a drink. There are houses in the shadow of the staircase and they have raingutters to keep the blood out of the flowerbeds.

various tv, film, and theater producers for the last 50 years smacking themselves in the forehead like fuuuuck how can we make it easy to understand why carrie is alienated from her peers and callously bullied at school WITHOUT making her a hideous fatass like in the book

For my fellow vegan/vegetarians, these sound scrumptious and look pretty simple to make substitutions!

certified soup post

as a mental health self-intervention, i recommend framing all your other mental health self-interventions in the most self-aggrandizing and mythopoetic manner you possibly can.  inside my own internal monologue i just unironically referred to putting away a few articles of clean laundry i’d left on my bed, an utterly unremarkable act which took me less than ten minutes, as “practicing the Light Arts”

this is the advanced mode of “magic is anything that makes you feel like you’re doing magic”: rather than drawing from existing magical traditions to create rituals that improve your life, just aggressively reframe basic life stuff in esoteric terms inside your head until you start to buy it

you can do this in reverse too. sometimes when I’m feeling really bad I “go on a massive self-destructive bender” where I have one drink and make embarrassing posts while listening to tallahassee, and it does a pretty good job of satisfying the cathartic itch

oh damn i’ll have to remember that one