around me black bats dive up from the dark.

given the relevant texts I am dangerous. alex, she/her programs, tired disgaybled girl, writer, just kind of an anxious person https://ko-fi.com/aroundmeblackbats if you want.

[bad-faith-misinterpreter]

my dream is to make a statement so true and verifiable that no one could misinterpret it even fi they were trying.

... Instead of end world hunger? What's wrong with you?

[aroundmeblackbats]

guys in this story

the guy who knows she's the villain but thinks this is one of the ones where the second they uncover the Secret, Real Villain, she'll be on the hero team again. she'll save the day. everyone will be so glad she's there. she's so excited for when the Real Villain shows up.

the guy who has a point-by-point and entirely correct analysis of what the villain's doing and why it's not going to work because it's not a very good plan and she doesn't know what her own motivations are. all he really needs is a guy to listen to that and go "okay, so what are your motivations? remind me again?" and he would immediately go "aw, shit, my plan for stopping her plan is the same plan, isn't it?" unfortunately, he doesn't have that guy.

the guy who has noticed that she has been assigned the role of McGuffin. those first two guys are really getting into this whole rivalry/redemption thing where they have parallel realizations about what's driving them. great. nice to be included but they could very much be Discovering The Truth about a big, locked box that says Phenomenon on it.

the guy who showed up to work today and everyone else was doing Found Family/Redemption narratives. if you squint, you can see the Teen Versions of her colleagues standing around, haunting the narrative. everybody had a traumatic experience together and now they're all gonna... oh, man, she's at work, though

the guy who is also at work on Our Teen Selves Are Haunting The Narrative Day but she's going to really lean into it. she's gonna snag "mean girl" before anyone else can get to it and then she gets to quip all day while everyone else has big feelings

the guy who is rolling her eyes and punching a science zombie while everyone else argues about a graph with "person" and "phenomenon" on the X axis and "helpful" and "harmful" on the Y axis. they're all pretty sure she goes on the graph somewhere. fuck your graph. there's zombies.

[aroundmeblackbats]

postpone your mom (task failed)

meds

get dressed because your mom’s coming here anyway.

eat an breakfast

discord: critique group first monday plans, critique group Ask Your Friends For What You Want Challenge, game store look around

schedule ketamine.

email laptop guy.

just order the taz balance novel on amazon. it's fine. you need an object. they sell objects. you've been failing to procure this object via a local independent bookstore for like two weeks. get the object.

writing: it'll help.

writing

figure out a plotline for your video game thing that is a little more straightforward to execute, please?

lead you home

necromancer

tabletop shenanigans

[pussyronin-deactivated20260120]

yeeuuuppp thats me. i bet you want to pet me and feed me little crickets. but guess what. please do that

[trochaic-mutant-ninja-tetrameter]

🎶But guess what, please do that! Fluffy creature!🎵

[fnordseer5]

our idiotic ancestors used to believe stuff that's not true but luckily we've now figured out all the true things to believe in

[throatoftheworld]

The Ermine Hunt by Leonora Carrington, 1954

[aroundmeblackbats]

okay. I get it. you're mad.

take your meds.

[aroundmeblackbats]

my last therapist said I was remarkably accepting of my difficult health situation. I got a good grade in radical acceptance. when I lived in DC.

now I live in Philadelphia

(if I stop calling it the oubliette will I hate it less? it's a nice apartment. it's not so bad I just don't get to leave or see my friends very often. and I got to see Zoe last week and I get to see a different visiting friend on Friday so.....)

and I am not radically accepting of shit. I am furious and miserable all the time and I can't figure out how to like, make peace with (checks notes) the fact that

I can't even finish that sentence I'm so mad.

ugh! and it's not helping. I'm only hurting myself being this angry. it's not changing the situation or making me safer.

the safest thing would be if I could learn to be content with the shape of my life. except I think that would be

if I could pull that off, I would be unpersoning myself on some level, I think. it would be home surgery on something vital and I don't know who would be left.

[prokopetz]

Dungeon crawling game set in a domain where the law of the land states that all hoards, troves, sacred relics, cursed rings, talking swords, and other unclaimed treasures are the property of the Crown, with the retrieving party being entitled only to a modest finder's fee, and also it uses XP-for-gold advancement specifically pinned to the percentage of retrieved articles' value the character in question is able to legally claim; much of play thus consists of fabricating legitimate-seeming provenances for retrieved treasures in order to obscure the fact that they were pried out of a dungeon and thereby defraud the King.

[prokopetz]

(No, this is not "yet another tax fraud premise". Circumventing state ownership of unclaimed hoards is a different thing – more forgery and less math, for one!)

[prokopetz]

@sigiledpaladin replied:

Yeah this isn't tax fraud, this is commodities laundering.

Of course it's the paladin who understands the distinction.

[bleed1ngbabyb0y]

[pangur-and-grim]

alright I'm almost finished Project Hail Mary, and I have to say, I don't get why people are shipping the guy with Markiplier when he's already in a perfectly healthy queer-platonic relationship with the alien spider made of rocks

[pangur-and-grim]

that's insane. we need to change this

[softinvasions]

extremely low-mid effort shitposting • April 2026

[hellotailor]

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, ‘Dear Jim: I loved your card.’ Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it.’ That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

— Maurice Sendak, author of ‘Where The Wild Things Are” (via 237yrs)

[aroundmeblackbats]

offering you estrangement/from your own dreams

I'll say all the right words/if only you'll come here, the whole way uphill

[plasmapop]

07/11/2025 • so trisyllabic assonances huh

[plasmapop]

21/01/2026

[plasmapop]

02/04/2026 • would you still love me if i was an igneous intrusion