Agatha Writes

Agatha. Sleepy, queer, and potentialy cursed. I'm gonna level with you, I don't tag for shit or curate anymore because I'm pretty much only on mobile and this is more just a place for me to toss my own stuff or funnies I spot. If you want things I spent more than half a second on, you have to go to my artblog @agathaarts. Also you cannot @ me I turned notifications off the year I joined Tumblr and I will not turn them back on ever. You have to directly message me things if you want me to see them and hope I actually check messages more than once a week bye 

[glitteraffe-art]

when your sleep regular paralysis demon is tbh crab

[teratocrat]

girl you would flourish under my dark tutelage

[apparently-satan-s-daughterrts]

How I'd summarise the plot of Warhams: A Chaos Odyssey so far 🤣

What "flourish" looks like may vary...

[goodlouse]

[thedreadvampy]

Everywhere I go I'm reminded how much the desire to punish homelessness and migration and other Undesirablenesses make society markedly worse for everyone

like why is the park locked after 5pm so I can't go and sit under a tree after work? to punish rough sleepers for the terrible crime of being homeless and alive

why do I have to buy a drink, beg for a code and fuck around with an awkward keypad for 5 minutes in order to take a piss? because fuck homeless people

why do I need to provide proof of address and photo ID to do everything? because we had to create a really hostile environment for migrants

why can't you sit anywhere? well because god forbid people sleep when they're pushed out of shelter. can't risk that.

every day governments, councils and businesses make your life worse as a side effect of making vulnerable people's lives WAY worse. if you're ok with that you're a fucking idiot and if you're in favour of it you're a vindictive cunt cause again literally the ONLY payoff for your life getting worse is other people's lives getting worser.

[abyssaldyke]

It's spring now which means the kids in my city have started drawing hopscotches on the sidewalk and as a rule I do every hopscotch I see because 1. Use it or lose it (ability to scotch) and 2. If a child got down on the hardscrabble streets of Boston Massachusetts to draw a scotch the least I can do is use it, but in doing the hopscotches, I've learned that about 50% of them are the typical 8-10 step scotch and the other 50% are. Somewhat avant-garde. And of course I'm not vetting the entire scotch before I start it so sometimes it's like haha 8 steps woo! Childlike whimsy! And sometimes they're 20 steps or 30 or they've got a section with three squares instead of two where you have to do a little Charleston to step on all three, or, memorably, FORTY one foot squares. A full BLOCK of jumping on one foot but I'm no quitter so once I've started Jigsaw Junior's fuckin hopscotch gauntlet I'm there til the end just a daily pot smoker in her thirties jumping kasa-obake style through an affluent suburb while some little proto-kennedy watches from his bedroom window rubbing his sadistic little third grade hands together and cackling. It's amazing. I love spring.

[slithergaunt]

This is painful. John Blanche has passed on.

Games Workshop and Warhammer would be nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, without him.

He was the beating heart of GW's worlds, made theses little toy games feel like they had a whole universe behind them.

His body of work is STAGGERING, and the amount detail he packed into each piece truly dwarfed the game itself.

One of the Lords.

Farewell.

👑

[thelaughingserpent]

This one in particular moved me. THIS is what I wanted my Tyranid army to look like. There was no way it could, but when playing that silly tabletop game, this is what I liked to imagine.

[onetobeamup]

The reason I reached for genre romance novels for Star Trek is Ive read so so so many of them and I know roughly how most of them convey something about the culture that produced them, in content and structure and what it means for what a culture values in a partner, and in themselves. It’s somewhat easy to use the scaffolding I already know to use existing genre conventions to explain something about the aliens in Star Trek.

I have not read enough murder and thriller novels to articulate what the genre is establishing about culture and values so I can’t be like ‘this is the dime airport novel about women getting sexy murdered but in Vulcan’ because I don’t know which genre conventions are load bearing and which are just more traditional. The murder mysteries i HAVE read are literally just Agatha Christie and maybe a handful of others that are directly inspired by her. I’ve watched a lot of murder television, but that is nottttt the same medium.

[unamccormack]

Bringing out those tags because so, so interesting, perhaps one of my favourite things, to mess around with patterns of story*. When I sat down with Spock to transcribe his autobiography, we came up with a form for what Vulcan memoir might look like, which he subverts. (There’s some of Sarek’s poetry too.)

Meditations on a Crimson Shadow is described as being set during a future war, so is a Cardassian sf novel. I figured it would surely, at least superficially, tell the story of Cardassian supremacy and permanent conquest, like Orwell’s boot stamping on a human face forever. Except maybe if you were reading it in the basement of your father’s home as your whole civilization implodes around you. Then I thought it might read differently. Or at least you would start the previously unimaginable work of imagining differently.

If historical fiction tries to reconfigure what we think was possible for people in the past, sf tries to configure what we think can be possible to us in the future. They feel very close, in my mind. Can we find sources or traditions in the past that give us succour or hope? What visions of the future are available to us, or do we need to imagine, and how do we map our way there? I think about these things all the time.

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, VI

* Patterns of Story was the title of my MA creative writing module where we read 6 novels and mucked around with them in as many ways as possible. This week we’ll go through one scene in Madame Bovary and see how meticulously it’s constructed. This week we’ll read some post-apocalyptic Kentish dialect and I’ll do my party piece from Ulysses. This week I’ll tell you why Moll Flanders is like the Doctor Who Hartnell-era story “The Sensorites”. This week I’ll explain what I think are the two distinctive modes in the crime novel. And this week we’ll read a modernist novel that you’ll doubt at best or hate at worst but ten years later you’ll email me to ask the title because you haven’t been able to get it out of your head. I loved teaching that class. What an amazing technology novels are. I really do like them, probably nothing nicer than novels.

[unamccormack]

Oh, just to add that if we go with Harold Bloom (wait! come back!) and read Shakespeare as "inventing" the human, then Garak's blustering that Shakespeare is rubbish and pointless can of course be taken as yet another crock of performative bullshit - not only does he QUOTE HIM TO TAIN (let me throw words learned from my beloved in your fucking face), but Shakespeare represents his encounter with humanity by which we mean Bashir by which we mean the crumbling of Garak's belief in Cardassian supremacy. Shakespeare by which we mean the human by which we mean Bashir rewires (see what I did there) Garak's brain to such an extent that I would not be surprised if Garak regularly catches himself thinking in blank verse.

[onetobeamup]

I think the concept of crimson shadow as a example of sci-fi literary fiction is genuinely fascinating, bc now I am thinking about the terrible copy cats after Orwell of pulpy shoot em up sci fi dystopias. (Also can’t believe how often I fall for The Canonical Liar who Lies. I’m genuinely so easy to trick.) Novels about surveillance robots and scantily clad beautiful reptilian women, and the concrete pillar of patriotism and nationalism you will always be able to build your identity around. I’m not gonna lie when I was first thinking about crimson shadow I didn’t make this leap of science fiction, I believe I was thinking about the Norse legend of ragnarok, where it’s spoken of in concrete future tense as though it both has happened before and will happen again in a cyclical nature of conquest.

I’ve done a piece before of rugal and ziyal and Jake discussing Star wars franchise as a piece of cardassian literature, with decades of one family either serving or destroying the state, with the filial obligations to the generation before as a repetitive epic, now I really want to revisit it with your incredible class lens of Patterns of Story.

I know there’s something on the bones of murder mystery thriller pulp that could be translated to Vulcan, something probably closer to the Detective kosuke kindaichi books, where it takes you through every single clue and a diagram of the house so you can see the logical leaps and make them yourself, as opposed to a Sherlock Holmes where you only really get the clues after they’ve amounted to a solution. The elements of murder mystery undertone of an empire in decline and a new era struggling to establish itself while ancient secrets come unburied that’s in both Agatha Christie and in Yokomizo is really the part that I cannot figure out how to change for Vulcan culture itself.

The other somewhat silly book genres I’ve been thinking about as I stretch a little outside my comfort zone is medieval travel writing (Marco polo, Ibn Battutaʼs Journeys,etc) as it would appear in really really early warp and pre warp cultures, and hard supernatural horror to lean into fears and anxieties

[unamccormack]

Besotted with these:

I’m blown away by the idea of Meditation depicting a Ragnarok that has always happened and always will happen, and what that might mean if you actually see the world end and yet live beyond it. Does that confirm the cyclical nature of history or completely shatter that view of the world?

On Cardassian sf, my mind is going now, as it often does, to Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum”; presumably a Cardassian version would switch it round so that at that end everyone was relieved to live in fascistic perfection. But reading that reversed story and looking out of the window at imperial decline would surely do strange things to your head (as, to some extent, reading it 40 years after publication does too).

Here’s my teaching notes on crime fiction (or, more precisely, forms of the thriller). Ruth Rendell and Barbara Vine are the same writer under different names, but the patterns of her respective books are completely different. The notes at the bottom suggest examples of a composite form. (This was from a seminar on genre, and genre expectations. Our book of the week was Frankenstein.)

A series of Cardassian detective novels on the lines of Aurelio Zen would be incredible: ostensibly about restoring order/faith in the system, but as the series advances we realise the settings track the slow decline of the Union. A subversive long-game on the part of the author (who, in time-honoured fashion) would therefore be as guilty as everyone else, of the crime of dissidence. Good luck getting that one past the Order. Would Vulcan crime novels centre round crimes of passion, that most deplorable of behaviours?

Travel writing! I can imagine a genre of Bajoran immram tales, monks on lightships reporting back on the strange worlds they have seen on their journeys across the stars…

[escuerzoresucitado]

[asskylosaurus]

You know I turned on the sound just to help me understand what was going on and I guess it was exactly what it looked like.

[geeoharee]

Ooh! Spot the industrial safety device! The worker has to press a 'stab the cheese' button with both hands. This is because if they're doing that, neither of their hands can be within the cheese stabbing zone.

[thetablestspoon]

This cheese is being stabbed safely

[tiredadventurer]

[thestuffedalligator]

[lamaison]

Legal Eagle asking "are you covered to have an open flame in the studio?" and a producer worriedly yelling "we're not!" as Ally goes to light a bong they filled with real whiskey is maybe the hardest I have ever laughed at an episode of Game Changer.

[romint-drake]

How it started

How it's going

[liamthesnail]

this is one of, if not the best screenshot i've ever gotten from a game changer episode in my entire fucking life

[kayvsworld]

I know some fic writers get stressed about writing tropes they think are too popular or overdone, and I need you all to know that I just spent 4 hours reading every iteration of the same exact fic plot I could find, and they all brought me an indescribable amount of joy. Listen. Listen. Sometimes you want cakes of many flavours and sometimes you want Nine Carrot Cakes

[thinkanamelater]

They should ship Brennan Lee Mulligan over to the UK and make him compete in Taskmaster. I think it'd be sort of a vacation from the kind of experiments that Sam plays on him

[arsenicandfinelace]

Conversely, I think Alex Horne should appear in person on Game Changer, in character as the Taskmaster’s Assistant now assisting Sam.

He should at first be pleasantly surprised by how nice Sam is as a boss, compared to Greg — he speaks so politely to him! — and over the course of the episode should grow more and more uncomfortable with Sam’s sunny-eyed sadism.

[scarabeegrandma]

so there's this fic by @startingatmidnight...

[startingatmidnight]

me rn but /positive and /notinvasionofthebodysnatchers

[espanolbot2]

Netflix Orders Big Box Store Adult Animated Comedy Series ‘Dealies’

Netflix has given a series order to adult animated comedy series Dealies, from Joe Bennett, Ted Travelstead and Green Street Pictures.

A savant salesman. A gentle gladiator. A quiet virtuoso. A summoner of the divine. And the poor soul who hired them. All part of the staff at Dealies, a big box store. They are masters of the delicate alchemy of trade. Prophets of enterprise. And occasionally they do some actual work.

Workplace sitcoms aren't really my jam, but I like he previous work the studio did on Scavengers Reign and Common Side Effects, and the title sequence looks cool.

[garaks-padded-cell]

Hey guys watch this intro NOW and get excited. I fucking love animation.