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"Pious ejaculation"

I'm autistic, for instance. I'm fortunate enough that it's not blatantly obvious at first glance (though you could also make the argument that I'm this way because of long and painstaking training in "how to act as a neurotypical person"). I don't go around telling random people that I'm autistic (despite the evidence to the contrary in this post). I especially don't tell people at work, with few exceptions for those that I trust. It's not that I'm trying to pretend I'm not autistic. It's simply that it's exhausting enough to function as an autistic person in the neurotypical world. I don't, as we say, have enough spoons for that conversation. Especially since there is risk associated with it.

take this test (https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/), then come back here:

it doesnt have to be a good score, you dont have to take it multiple times, you dont have to get on a good screen, etcetera. just gimme your score please this is my final project grade :)

Great first introducton, we love a strong female character with an unusual profession. Props to the director because some of the scenes look straight out of a painting!! POJ is my first cdrama and oh boy i didn't know what i was missing.

Obligatory dialogue exposition by the town's gossip. . .

she's an orphan

she has a little sister

she got rejected by her fiancée family and brings bad luck.

Talk shit get hit with pig's blood.

She really said "Not my circus, not my monkeys", but we know she's a good person with a heart of gold because she can't walk away from him.

That's fate baaaby.

Suuuure Changyu, can't even fool Ning.

Sleeping beauty over here.

"I always have a mysterious breeze flowing through my luscious hair."

"And my evil uncle, but that's a locked backstory for a later episode."

#BUSTED

So it's more or less the end of the week now, and time to update people on what's been going on.

The tl:dr; version: Because of the large number of people who rolled up to buy ebooks from the Ebooks Direct store (see the earlier message here), and the very many generous folks who dropped cash into my Ko-Fi (and please bear with me while I get all the thank-you messages sent!), "Project: Escape" is a go.

And thank you all again! You folks are all, absolutely, stars. 🥲

So this is how things will now unfold (and I designed this getaway to be as stress-free as possible, so it mostly runs along lines, and routes, that I've often traveled before). Here, pretty much, is where I'll be.

On Wednesday May 6th I fly from Dublin into Zürich and catch a train to the western Austrian lakeside city of Bregenz. I'll be there for a few days, chilling as much as possible. (Though work will also be happening... as work always seems to wind up happening when I'm over there. It's a good town for that.) ...The image at the top of the post is a summertime shot of the lakeshore, not far from the Bregenzer Festspiele* and the town's Casino.

Bregenz is familiar territory, where I've spent a good bit of time both on my own (on writing trips) and with @petermorwood. We often stayed here overnight on our way in to Munich to see the folks at the production company for whom we wrote Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King / Sword of Xanten / Die Nibelungen / whatever other name you know it by. It's a small, pleasantly walkable city with an artistic bent. Yet you can also sit lunching at a cafe's outdoor table, feel a shadow pass over you, and look up to see a passing golden eagle from the nearby mountains sailing by low and idly scoping out you and your entree...

After a few days in Bregenz, I'll take a ferry up to Konstanz, a town I've been past before but where I've never stayed. (Here’s the ferry’s route…)

…There I'll sit still for a few more days (ideally taking some time to see the archaeological museum there). After that I'll grab a train back down to Züri, crash there for one last night, and then fly back to Dublin earlyish the next morning.

And after that: Back to business as usual... in, I very much hope, a somewhat improved state of mind. I mean: no way I'm going to stop missing Peter any time soon. That, I'm pretty sure, is now a permanent feature of my basic state of being. But having spent a little while in a place where it'll be impossible not to think about all the good times we had together in that neck of the woods, I think that'll make a big difference to me, especially at this difficult time.

Naturally I'll be posting here from there, every now and then, as things come up to be shared. It's a nice town: scenic. (And besides that, sometimes you see unusual things in the shop windows. (Like this...)

...Meanwhile, for the time being I'll leave the original "Seeking escape" post up, in case anyone still wants details about the ebook bundles on offer. (The prices really are low, and I feel no great urge to raise them right now... because honestly, if there was ever a time people might want cheapish distraction from the junk going on in the world, this might be it. Yet a sad reminder: we cannot sell into the UK due to Brexit.) ...And if anyone wants to drop something into the Ko-Fi toward a glass of wine or a chocolate-heavy dessert, well, don't let me stop you. 😅

Once again, everybody: thank you so much for your kindness. It's so much appreciated. ❤️

And now it's time for starting the pre-packing laundry...

ETA: attn @greggs-mistflower: The sculpture in the background, as it turns out, is called “Hommage an Brigantium (Tribute to ancient Brigantium”), and the more pictures of it I view online, the more I’m starting to think there is NO angle from which it can be viewed that isn’t at least potentially rude. And some are REALLY a lot worse than others… Bear with me a sec while I add some. Honestly, I’m starting to wonder what the sculptor was thinking of… 😏

When I was in high school (early 80s), I was in a literature class that assigned us to read Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. In the previous incarnation of that class, one of the students (confused about the book as only a high school student can be) called up information and asked for Ken Kesey's phone number. He was listed at the time (hell, he was alive at the time). He called Kesey up and asked him what the book was actually about. Kesey said "Don't try to screw the unscrewable."

Those astronauts are really living in the Now

Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention.  Mind the warnings and your health always comes first. Its a HILARIOUS story, I promise.

As always, all the names have been changed to protect people’s identities.  This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.

When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.

Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace.  Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on.  In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.

For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you.  It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass.  All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.

*

“Hey dad,” Six-year old me asked the first time he told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine at church. “Isn’t that cannibalism?”

“We’re getting to that.”  He waved.