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Does anyone else think that Lucrezia Mongfish has, perhaps, become a parody of herself?
People who knew her 20 years ago-- Klaus, the Jaegermonsters, Prince Aaronev Sturmvoraus, the newly ascendant Rat Queen, etc-- say she was always like this. They testify that they're not surprised she turned out to be the one who devestated Europa with aerial bombardments and horrific Mind-Control Wasps.
And yet.
I can't help but think, she wasn't always like this.
Once upon a time, she was one woman, with one physical body. She was a brilliantly powerful spark, and she wasn't afraid to lie, steal, copy notes, and cheat to get ahead, on top of that.
She had at least 3 powerful men wrapped around her finger-- Agatha got some of that Rizz from her Mom's side, but Lucrezia was actively trying to seduce and manipulate the boys, and play them against each other.
Let's say the Heterodyne Boys were actively doing heroics for about 25ish years, before it all went wrong. Bill would've been in his 40s when he finally got married.
Lucrezia Mongfish would've been in her 40s when she got married. She's still beautiful, still desired, still healthy-- but time marches on, relentlessly.
Pouting at her Daddy to come help his favorite daughter... It just isn't cute anymore.
Castle Heterodyne was no doubt glad that Bill finally brought a wife home, but I'm sure that it ALSO encouraged him & Barry to open the Seraglio for some younger models, if she didn't produce a healthy Heterodyne Heir or five fast enough.
.
Lucrezia Mongfish wanted Eternal Youth. She wanted to be "Forever 21." She wanted that Second Breakthrough, that ascendance that was promised to her when the Geisterdamen called her Goddess.
But she's in her 40's, and she's shipped off Klaus so he won't cause trouble, and Aaronev's hair is thinning and he's looking at a political marriage, and she has the Heterodyne, but Mechanicsburg does not LOVE HER.
She is a Spark, and she is brilliant and ambitious and determined, and she has been studying mind-manilulation and transferance for years. She finds a Muse, in the catacombs of the ancient Heterodynes, and she successfully transfers a mind from machine to flesh, with the personality intact.
I'm sure there were many test-subjects, and many experiments, before she was ready to try it on herself.
I think something went wrong.
.
Lucrezia Mongfish was once a woman with a singular body, with a heartbeat and breath, and appetites for cake, for sex, for power, for love, for adoration, for music, for jewels... She wanted it all.
But she still had to sleep, and hydrate. Take bathroom breaks. Experience boredom, and itches, the relief of removing restrictive garments, the minor pleasures and frustrations of being alive.
Then she made herself into a bodiless ghost, distilled "essence" that could-- in theory-- jump from host to host, or take on MANY bodies., so that she would never have to age, and never have to die.
Something went wrong, of course.
There are fewer compatible hosts than you'd think, out there. Her brilliant machines are delicate, finicky, and the processes were executed imperfectly by her devoted followers.
She wanted to turn back the hands of time. She found herself adrift, trapped outside of it, for untold ages. Stuck in a box, going insane, with nobody to rescue her from her own bad decisions.
She wanted a brand-new body-- but this one is inelegant, that one can't hold a Spark, this one is missing some parts-- like skin, or taste buds, or a foot-- and that one isn't PRETTY ENOUGH!
She's throwing a tantrum. She is the ghost of A Woman With Appetites, but she no longer exists in a body that can crave cake, or sex, or water, or sleep. She has the distorted memory of an emptiness inside, and she must force everyone to love her, to adore her, to OBEY HER EVERY WHIM so that she can feel right again.
She used to hunt cats for fun, on her family estate. Her father taught her to respond to pain by spreading it around. She was spoiled, and played both Wicked Schemer and Damsel In Distress, for longer than she should've gotten away with it.
Was she like Zola? Was she like Sephie?
Who was Lucrezia Mongfish, when she was a young woman with a father, and sisters, and a mother who is never mentioned, friends and frenemies and rivals from University, and dozens of handsome young suitors to choose from?
Who was Lucrezia, when she was no longer quite as young, when she was married, when she was pregnant with her second child, and ready to take the plunge towards Immortality?!
Would she recognize the person, the ghost, the demonic legion, that she has become?
#NICELY put.#it's not nothing i think that like#otilia and the castle are extremely impressive 'how did you do that' examples of her work with flesh-machine transfer#and technically all the involved processes worked.#BUT#von pinn was miserable and dysphoric the whole time she was flesh to the point where she's hugely relieved to be a giant metal cat.#and the castle - not being designed to be in a tiny body - went insane. @brawltogethernow's tags, and a potentially narratively relevant reflection of the success of her work....
The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.
Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.
So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.
Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.
As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.
Villain: “But our similarities mean that, deep down, you’re a bad person. There’s nothing stopping you from being just as evil as I am!”
Hero: “Sure there is. I’m stopping me.”
Villain: “But in your heart you crave—”
Hero: “Sometimes when I’m in a crowded building I get the sudden urge to just boop a stranger right on the nose. But I don’t do it, because that would be super rude and weird. Does having that compulsion in the first place make me just as much of a weirdo as if I had acted on it? Maybe it does in your eyes, but to the would-be boopee, it makes all the difference in the world.”
Villain: “We’re not talking about booping noses, we’re talking about killing peop—”
Hero: “Look, dude, I’m sure murder can be really satisfying. But I’ve decided that I don’t want to murder people, and I think that’s very sexy of me. Look at me. With a little self-restraint, you might have had what I have.”
Villain: “But surely it disturbs you, doesn’t it? To know how close you are to snapping. Don’t deny it. There’s so much darkness in your heart. Do you really think they’d still love you if they knew? They’d be disgusted by you. They’d hate you, for thinking so much like me.”
Hero: “That’s the difference, isn’t it? Between you and I. One tiny difference. That’s all it takes. That’s the line between good and evil.”
Villain: “What?”
Hero: “You saw your own darkness and let it destroy you. You surrendered to it the moment you realized it was there. You threw open the door for it and welcomed it inside and let it rob you of your humanity without even a word of protest because you just couldn’t imagine it was something you could fight.”
Villain: “And you, oh-so-sanctimonious one?”
Hero: “I said ‘no thanks’. That’s it. That’s the difference.”
Villain: “Did you just—did you just—”
Hero: “Boop your nose? You’re right. It did feel good.”
Villain: “Well, you’ve had your fun. I suppose you expect me to come back to the angels, right? To find the light that was within me all along? To realize that, deep down, I’m really a good man at heart?”
Hero: “No. I don’t believe in that crap.”
Villain: “What?”
Hero: “I don’t give a shit who you are ‘deep down’. That doesn’t matter. Good guys, bad guys—there’s no such thing. Just people. Just people who get up each morning and decide whether they’re gonna try to save the world or burn it down.”
Villain: “If there’s no such thing as a ‘good person’, according to you, then what on Earth would be the appeal of redemption?”
Hero: “I’m just saying. Maybe you should try a new morning routine.”
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pick whatever option the person you're following who reblogged this post didn't pick. if they didn't say in the tags what they picked or if you're seeing the original post and not a reblog, pick at random instead.
So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.
I love the lawyer metaphor, because whenever I see “John knew that...” in prose writing I immediately think “how? How does he know it?” Interrogate your witnesses. Cross-examine them. Make them explain their reasoning. It pays dividends.
First, let me preface this with something very important: you can treat all of this advice as SECOND-DRAFT ADVICE. It is so much easier to rewrite this kind of stuff once you have words on the page. Telling yourself the first draft is totally appropriate and acceptable.
What we’re talking about here are FILTER WORDS (and to some degree verbs of being). Yes, “thought” words are included. But so are “heard, saw, looked, tasted, smelled” etc.—most words having to do with the senses.
This isn’t black and white advice; sometimes you’ll use these words and that’s okay. They’re not WRONG. They’re just weaker. And they’re weaker because they create distance between the reader and the experience of the character.*
If you want your reader to feel like they’re experiencing the story right alongside the character, you want to cut down on filter words.
*This is particularly important with first person and close third POVs. The reader always knows whose eyes they’re seeing through and thoughts they’re privy to. So you don’t need to tell them “I saw X.” Or “I heard X.” Or “I thought Y.” You can just jump into the action/observation as it’s happening.
This is also where you want to pay attention to verbs of being.
“It was rainy.” Versus: “The rain pounded against the roof.” Or “The rain howled like an injured animal.” Or “The rain tapped against the window like an anxious lover.” All of these are inviting the reader deeper into the experience of the story by using stronger verbs and similes. And, at the same time, they stir feelings (instead of TELLING feelings). And feelings keep your reader engaged. Engaged readers keep turning pages; engaged readers become FANS.
The most valuable advice that Author Ex gave me through the years that we wrote together was this: the problem with all these filter words is that they create distance in the POV.
That means that when you read a line like
John saw that the curtains were open.
It immediately takes you OUT of the character's perspective and instead tells you what they experience as a secondhand observation.
You don't have to get fancy or purple with how you rephrase things like this. Not everything needs a ton of breathing room.
You wanna know what's perfectly impactful while keeping a tight POV?
random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google
I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.
also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo
also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)
i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:
Search Engines
Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy
DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)
WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.
Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.
Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.
Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines.
Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted.
Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy.
Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.
Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden.
MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.
Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching.
Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar.
https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results.
https://www.mojeek.com/
https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites.
https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.
https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.
https://yep.com/ is a crawler
https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx
https://www.dogpile.com/
https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)
https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?
https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?
https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.
Other Searchers
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine
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Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):
Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click.
"Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said.
Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from.
"If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."
And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):
While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.
Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.
And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:
When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of “catastrophic” impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites.
Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions.
Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers.
Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Google’s planned changes to search are “going to have a devastating impact on the Internet.”
“It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.
Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️
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Up until very recently, I have been a supporter of the "maybe we can scuttle Castle Wulfenbach only a little bit? It's too cool and too good an idea to give up!" school of thought.
Now that we know it's been assimilated by the Lucrezia Collective, indeed I have heeded the words of the ancient sages, and now I say we should take off and nuke the thing from orbit.
but what if blowing up CW merely scatters the lu-bots? we saw something similar in the circus fight, and it would be pretty hard to guarantee that all the infected dingbots were destroyed in the scuttling. we could end up with lu-bots scattered across the countryside infecting any technology they come across! what we need to do is send CW straight to eeby deeby with no return
Look we can't keep hurling all of our supervillain problems into extra-dimensional vortexes, eventually they're going to start coming back even worse than before.
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