If you're not talking Invincible I don't wanna talk.

Another detail I love: the two human-controllers figuring out Jake must be a morpher and then deciding that "maybe Visser Three doesn't need to hear about this" (p. 26).

Rachel and Ax always make for a fascinating team, and a part of me wonders — despite their mutual animosity — if they couldn't be nearly as much of a powerhouse of effectiveness as Marco-and-Tobias if given a chance. Ax is a lot more willing to tell Rachel outright "It could be a trap" when she suggests rushing down to help Jake, and Rachel is more comfortable than Jake ever is with simply telling Ax "we'll spread out and look for David" without wondering if the order is overstepping. These two don't have an overabundance of ethical complexity, it's true, but they're also exactly the mini-team you want on your side for dealing with a rogue Animorph.

Also, David's extremely literal dehumanization as his sole ethical boundary is chilling. The series itself recognizes how ridiculous it is to judge on the basis of appearance in this world in particular, but that doesn't stop David from declaring that he won't kill humans before fatally injuring Jake and apparently killing Tobias — because they're not human, right? You get the sense that if David had spent any time at all around Tobias or Ax before the decision point, there's no way in hell any of them would've voted to make him an Animorph. Like, "not all people are human" and "all people have humanity" are such glaringly obvious through-lines of the series that you don't really think about them until David comes along and violates them.

I've always defended the opening exposition of Animorphs books as being more elegant than most people realize — it's the only series fiction work I know of with specifically a semi-episodic format, and it still manages to get five times the exposition across in half the space that Babysitter's Club books do. But this book in particular shows us the details we need (what morphing is, how David ended up in this situation) or it doesn't give us those details at all. Either you pick up on the relationship between Rachel and Tobias through Rachel assuming that anyone who lands next to her in bed at night must be him, or you don't and you get by just fine without. You can tell Jake and Rachel are cousins because their mutual cousin is in the hospital, but again all you need to know is that Rachel feels protective toward Jake — which comes across in that opening narration just fine. So on and so forth.

Moby Cassie! No thoughts, just Moby Cassie.

Uggghhh the scene between Rachel and Jordan talking about Saddler is another of those decades-long favorites. Rachel being so clumsy but well-meaning as she does her best to comfort her sister feels so relatable. And the sheer scale of the issues they're tackling — mortality, victim blaming, the randomness of death, the fact that kids aren't "supposed" to die but do anyway, the complexity of being sad someone you kinda dislike is dying — is all the worse because Rachel is trying to thrash through this conversation on her second night of less than an hour of sleep. It's these elements of realism, with kids just dying in random awful accidents (followed by being eaten by fellow kids in morph), that makes Animorphs so damn impactful.

And then, just when we're kind of recovering from that devastating conversation between Rachel and Jordan, we find out that David was in the room the whole time. That he's sitting somewhere on Rachel's body, commenting on her looks, and she doesn't have a way to stop him. And "Go ahead and enjoy your shower" (p. 124). Ugh, ugh ugh ugh UGH.

The conversation between Jake and Rachel on Rachel's porch is another classic case of Rachel's view of herself being so much harsher than anyone else's. Jake all but says outright that he was scared of David, and he sent Ax for Rachel because he wanted Rachel there to help him feel safe.

"Not for the first time, I looked at Jake and wondered what he had become. He was sitting there, looking like any other kid stuck in any other boring minivan. If you saw him walk down the street you might think, Oh, there's a nice-looking guy. But you wouldn't see half of what there was to Jake. But then, I guess that's true of everyone. You can never be sure whether the pretty blond lugging a pair of bulging Express bags through the mall is just another sweet, ditzy, harmless mall rat. Or me." (p. 133) The writing in this book is excruciating, I hate it, everything hurts and nothing is okay, this is the best book ever written.

Rachel's thought that she'd be willing to kill Saddler because "no one should have to be so... helpless" (p. 128). Yeeeeeesh. Like, I've mentioned before that Saddler foreshadows Tom — Rachel's cousin who's ~2 years older, "stupid enough" to be in the wrong place at the wrong time but still clearly not deserving that, not likely to get a happy ending no matter what his family tells each other, and Rachel's willing to kill him if that's the only thing left she can do to prevent him being "so helpless." But also: Saddler foreshadowing David? Almost worse. Because it's a whole other type of "helpless." Because Rachel doesn't kill him, and we don't know if that's better or not. Because yeah, maybe Saddler shouldn't have cut into traffic on a bike with no helmet on, but that doesn't stop his fate from being wildly unfair.

Jake asks Rachel if she has ideas for how to handle Saddler — and Rachel takes that to mean he's asking her how far she's willing to go to stop him. But we know, because we've been in Jake's head, that he's really just hoping someone will come up with a plan he can implement, because that's what he's always doing. Rachel is so so hard on herself in this book, but her perception that Jake sees her as a weapon is clearly off-base from the reality that he "worries about [her] more than anyone but Tobias" because he's scared the war is hurting her almost as badly as it is Tobias (p. 106). Not because he thinks she's a "violent nut" like Rachel is afraid she's becoming.

Also, that scene in the hallway is so heartbreaking because Jake and Rachel realize that the violence being against a fellow kid — a fellow Animorph — really does mean it's different this time. And they're so clear-eyed about the fact that they can see a future for Cassie after the war, a future for Marco, hopefully a future for Ax. But for themselves, and Tobias? They already know how this war is going to end, and that the possibility of any kind of normal life is off the table. And they accept that fact, and they hug, and they vow to keep right on protecting their team. No matter what it takes. No matter how little of either of them is left, when this all is done.

Jake: Got lost in the game?

Rachel: No, killed a guy with his own arm.

Jake: Oh...

Jake: But it was like, a controller, right?

Rachel: Yes it was a controller!! Jeez!

Texts From Superheroes

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

Bad news: This morning I completely cracked up. So, instead of making progress, I came up with… this.

Don’t ask me where this idea came from. I really have no idea. Maybe it’s my Yirk Créa messing with my brain again (I hate her, really T_T)

Anyway, I hope this at least puts a smile back on your face if you’ve had a bad day.