Feral, Over-caffeinated, Rabid

I love how Carl's love for Donut and Bea is shaped by the love he's felt before. being in denial about how much he cares about Donut because last time he cared about a pet, it was taken from him. not realizing how bad his relationship with Bea was because being shut out, yelled at, having stuff thrown at him were all things his parents did too. Carl only recognizes the "drama" in his relationship with Bea when she cheats on him because no matter what happened with his mom, dad, or fish, Bea is the only person to ever hurt him in that way

as an optimist i dream of a beautiful world where people are fucking normal about aromanticism

At first I read “as an optometrist” and was just ready to accept the statement as is like oh yeah maybe some kind of pun about if people’s views weren’t clouded by hatred and biases they could be normal about aro and aspec in general but then I reread it was like “sigh, time for my nearsighted ass to go back to the optometrist.”

misread aromanticism as astigmatism

some of you need to get new aspecs

just received the best text message I’ve ever had. from my mom

Cannot get over how accurate those text images are in describing the intonation of the dialogue.

love when ppl ask to see pics of my axolotl and are expecting something cute + pink + all smiles and instead with genuine fear in their eyes, and in their heart, say WHAT the fuck is that.

big fan of the four-year-old on this flight who yelled "THEY ARE BRINGING COMPLEMENTARY BEVERAGES" when the flight attendants came down with the drinks cart

'A popular fanfic author stopped updating her fic because she said that the stress of being constantly falsely accused of using AI was a witch hunt and it was destroying her mental health to the extent that she needed to take a break from writing, leading to multiple online discussions defending her and debates about AI accusations and how You Can't Really Tell So Leave Her Alone, and then someone realised that there were Claude coding artefacts in her fics and that it was a super pervasive problem in that particular fandom, proven definitively by looking at the source coding of each work on AO3, and she denied it for a bit but then ultimately admitted that oopsie, she had been using genAI all along, and then she deleted all of her fics off AO3 and people got mad because they were being denied access to their favourite fics, even though they now knew definitively that they were genAI slop, and then it turned out that she'd actually stopped updating the fic on AO3 in the first place because she'd been shopping it around to agents and editors as an original work with the serial numbers filed off, and she'd been in conversations with a publisher which ultimately got dropped because she'd lied to them about her AI use' oh cool, so we're in Hell, then

Let me be clear: if you use AI to write fanfic, paticularly if you do so in the hopes of snapping up a tradpub deal off the basis of the popularity of your worthless slop, then you are an absolute grade A ding-dong, and may the vengeful spirits of our beloved Spirk Elders haunt you via the medium of perpetual papercuts forevermore.

I am unaware of who this is referring to and feel like a small fishing boat that just saw the dorsal fin of Leviathan off the starboard bow

That is so extremely valid, and truly I wish that I had not myself plunged into the depths and seen the truth of the Leviathan (a gigantic plastic fish effigy that's broken off a derelict Fish & Chip shop and washed into the Atlantic: a harbinger of doom in its own synthetic tongue)

So many lessons in fandom and life boil down to make your own works for love of the game, don't go looking for ways to be an asshole to people, don't lie when people ask you something that challenges you to be better, and don't fucking cheat.

i love how there's at least two different points in carl's arc where the book poses the question "does carl hate the universe enough to choose that hatred for them over his care for his friends?" and both times the answer is a resounding "no." in the butcher's masquerade he has the brief thought that he could trigger carl's doomsday scenario and it would kill all the hunters, but also donut and everyone else. and he asks himself if he's willing to make that sacrifice, and then that option isn't mentioned again. it's a resounding "no." then in eye of the bedlam bride he thinks about how much he hate borant and the universe that did this and how angry he is at them, and we know that that rage is POTENT, and if he's willing to kill his friends to make borant pay. and he once again chooses his love for his friends over that anger and hate