Queer polyamorous professional scientist working an engineer job. "scientist by day" tag if you want academia content and/or science news. Unable to follow anyone who makes too many posts per day, nothing personal.
I honestly think Gen-Z and younger simply does not understand how recent widespread smartphone adoption is.
I am not that old, and I didn't have a smartphone until probably late high school. For most of my life, many if not most people were not walking around with a magic internet machine in their pocket that they pulled out and used constantly for everything.
The thing about the gods is this: they made the world, but they don't really know how.
That's a simplification, of course, but it's a good one. It's a tollbridge fiction – you pay the price and it takes you somewhere interesting.
The toll is believing something that's technically a lie.
But once the toll’s paid, you begin to cross the river. And, before you know it, you find you’re walking shoulder-to-shoulder with the divine.
Take it from me: that's a good thing.
I remember when the lines were less blurry. When we kept the gods imprisoned in temples and palaces and heavens.
I was a shrine cat, in those days. On bright sunny days when the wind is heavy with pollen-laced memory, I can still taste the blood on my tongue.
There was blood everywhere in those days, so it was a good time to be a shrine cat. You just had to loiter by the channels cut into the sides of the altar and you'd never go hungry or without fusses.
The priests would try to fuss me, sometimes. Some of them thought they were cat people.
“Oh sweet Suki,” they'd say, reaching out with their perfectly trimmed nails, “you are so pretty with your soft fur and the gore on your whiskers. Wouldn't you like a pet beneath your blood-stained chin?”
But I knew they were not cat people. They were god people.
Now and again, I would let them think they were safe and accept their touch. Then, thinking they were safe, I would sctratch and bite them. Catching them unawares, I could get a really good grip on their flesh.
That is where the real treats of the shrines were kept, of course.
I had learned this from the ghosts of the sacrifices. Some of those ghosts were cat people, so I let them pet me and tell me their stories. I would lick up their lifeblood and – with the taste of their heart’s milk on my tongue – I would guide them through the tricky currents and rocks of the river.
This left plenty of time for stories.
This is how I learned the gods were prisoners, even though they did not know it.
This is how I learned the priests kept the gods’ secrets hidden on the insides of their skin, inscribed in moonlight and blossoms where none could see.
Oh, I'm sorry, I was telling you about how the gods made the world, wasn't I?
Well, that's the thing. In those days, the gods knew how they'd done it.
And, so long as the priests kept them walled up in cathedrals or sacred springs or afterlives, the priests were the only ones they could tell the secrets of creation.
It would have remained that way, were it not for the ghosts and the shrine cats.
The ghosts, you see, were not too happy about being sacrificed to keep the god-walls up.
But the shrine cats were the only ones they could talk to, and most of us were happy as we were. Happy to keep sleeping on the warm red-stained stone of the altars. Happy to keep supping on the streams of gravestone-blessed viscera as they joined the river.
However, some of the priests kept trying to pet me. Even though they were not cat people.
So I, clever Suki, listened to the ghosts and stole the secrets from the priests’ illuminated skins.
I carried those secrets to the orchard fields and spat them up in the roots of the apple trees.
When the blossoms bloomed on the trees, the breeze carried dreams of injustice.
When the fruit fell upon the earth, they held inside them visions of a future celestial.
When the priests found out what I'd done, they cursed me… because of course they did. They called me ungrateful and wicked and flighty (all true). They bid the earth always echo my footfall. They bid the wind always carry my scent.
With that curse, and with the bloody channels from the shrines all dried up, I died hungry.
But the ghosts and the gods were grateful. So the ghosts taught me how to dig my claws into the flank of life. Then the gods gave me all their old standing stones and chapels and hells to haunt.
What had I been telling you?
Oh, right. So… living amongst the mortals as they do, the gods find it hard to explain how they do their godly things. Y'know, like making the world.
Maybe it's because the words for that sort of thing only exist in the godly places, and they won't live there anymore. Or maybe it's because they gave too many of their secrets to the priests and now they're lost.
You might say: but Suki! You haunt those godly places now! And you stole those secrets from the priests with your sharp teeth! Surely, you can tell us what the gods cannot?
And to that I say: maybe I could or maybe I couldn't. But if I do hold onto those knowings, they are mine and mine alone.
You live in a world celestial. The gods walk among you, close enough to clasp your hand or pick your pocket.
Just try to enjoy it, will you?
---
This story was based on the prompt 'Suki - cat, ancient, vindictive, distractable' by one of my Ko-Fi supporters.
Want to submit your own prompts to be turned into puns and fiction? Consider supporting me on Ko-Fi https://ko-fi.com/strangelittlestories
I have been fucking around with my armour for long enough to have rediscovered the entire journey that Europe went through 1100-1500. I kept adding bits to cover gaps, then realising they were causing problems and adjusting things to not cause problems anymore, and reinventing stuff that they invented in 1400. I gotta put articulation in my hip armour because the design I created is AMAZING for protection (a little bit too amazing, I literally got shot twice in the butt with a ballista and knew NOTHING about it until the siege team told me) but I think I should sometimes be able to sit down in chairs. Now I know why they didn't design it that way.
Which is great experimental archaeology and all, but the latest thing I've rediscovered is that gambesons are actually, like.... necessary.... not because you need the padding (my chestplate does just fine with the foam glued inside it) but because you need arming points. My elbows have to be held up somehow, and every way I've found of attaching them to the shoulder results in reduced arm mobility. If they attach to my sleeve then nothing can go wrong
But I don't want to die of heatstroke. Which I will, if I add a gambeson into my current kit
So I'm contemplating a plan: gambeson mini crop top. I only need enough gambeson to anchor padding under my shoulders and points for my elbows. It needs sleeves, it needs shoulders, it doesn't need to go down further than my armpits. This is going to look like some kind of cursed anime girl outfit item designed purely to create a boob window but I swear this is for science. I have to fuck this up so I can rediscover why they didn't make armour this way in the 1300s
#fucking outstanding op#once I tried to do my bobbin lace by candlelight#and immediately noticed every single prep step I had skipped as “unnecessary”#like yeah you DO need your pattern pre-pricked and nicely inked if you can't fuckign see#and having contrasting colors between your lace and your working surface is simply so important#and any pin not either in the project or in the pincushion was just Gone (tags via @epsilon-delta)
I'm probably gonna get yelled at for saying this but sometimes something isn't a real problem in fandom, you just learned a Japanese word describing a general fandom practice and got scared and decided it meant "The Bad Ones" of that practice
Whenever you see someone being like "we don't mind when women enjoy or even create m/m content, we just hate fujoshis" you are being racist. If you mean "I hate the way some female fans treat gay men like fetish objects" then say that, and we can have a conversation based on that, but "fujoshi" is, I cannot stress this enough, just a word for any woman who likes M/M content, for better or worse. It may have started out as a reclaimed insult (by the way, the insult was based on "liking gay shit makes you perverted and sinful," not "please respect the humanity of gay men") but it does not make a distinction between The Good Ones and The Bad Ones. You just decided to No True Scotsman it and that the English word for that should describe The Good Ones and the Japanese word for it should describe The Bad Ones
Same goes for the people I saw just the other day whose discord server explicitly disallowed "Yaoi" but said that M/M content was allowed. What they meant was "M/M content is allowed as long as it isn't pornographic and fetishistic." What they actually said was "M/M content is allowed, but M/M content is strictly forbidden," and expected you to understand that the Japan-Adjacent term has porn/fetish connotations while the English-language term for THE SAME THING refers to the "normal, non-perverted" version.
It'd be like if you used the word "cartoons" to refer to all Family-Friendly animation, regardless of style or country of origin, whether it's Japanese or American or French or whatever, and used the term "anime" to refer to all animated pornography regardless of style or country of origin. There's plenty of animated pornography that isn't Japanese! There's plenty of anime that's not pornographic! But this is the sort of thing you do when you say shit like "obviously women can read stories about gay men, but NO FUJOSHIS"
OP is correct and smart for saying this. this is related to/a subset of how people are about non-fandom foreign words, too, like how people say "Christians worship God (good), Muslims worship Allah (bad and scary)" when gues swh. gu. guess what. gues s w hat Allah mea. guess what the word "Allah" means--!!
if you are a parent, or may become one, or you are otherwise likely to arrive in the situation of caring for a child while they eat, promise me this: if a child doesn't like a certain food or food group, you will ask them WHY. and specifically, you will pay attention to either confirming or ruling out "it makes my mouth itch" or "it makes my stomach hurt," both of which are medically important info that children may not provide unprompted. which i know because this PSA has been brought to you by "i spent my entire childhood and much of my early teens eating peas and lentils while wondering why everyone else liked the Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation so much, like were they a bunch of legume masochists or something, before i finally realized that Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation was in fact a sinister demon appearing only to me, and her true demonic name was: Legume Allergy"
Is your landlord invading your privacy? Is your apartment heated inadquately? Do your utilities keep getting shut off because your landlord isn’t paying? Have you been trying to get them to repair your dishwasher for five months and they won’t replace the spray arm part even though it’s visibly broken?
You’ve heard of employee unions using collective bargaining to force the bosses to provide better pay and better working condiditions. But did you know if you rent an apartment in an apartment complex, you can do something similar?
It’s called a Tenant Association, and it’s basically a union for renters.
Here’s an overview of the why and how of forming a tenant association
Here’s a more thorough organizing manual
When it comes down to it, you and your fellow tenants are the ones paying your landlord’s salary. Go remind them of that.
So currently I answer to my full first name (which I usually introduce myself with) as well as two nicknames/diminutives plus my last name when people mistake it for a first name. There are two or three other nicknames I've also gone by in the past. I'm perfectly fine with this, or neutral at minimum-- I have a common name and have had to be flexible with how I'm distinguished for my whole life. I also don't feel a deep and fundamental connection of my name with my identity, though I think going by another name entirely would confuse me.
A number of friends have been appalled at me being called names I don't say are my name. Which is really weird to me, although I'd go to battle for anyone else who was getting either deadnamed or called something they didn't want. But this perspective seems surprisingly common!
How do you feel about being called something other than the name you introduce yourself with?
I think it's fun if people give me (non-derogatory) nicknames or shorten my name
I don't care if people call me something else and will answer to it
I'm mildly uncomfortable or annoyed but won't make an issue of it
I HATE being called something else and will always correct people
Have you experienced the Tetris Effect in any way?
Have you experienced the Tetris Effect in any way?
Yes
No
Remaining time: 1 day 1 hour
The Tetris effect occurs when someone dedicates substantial time, effort, and concentration to an activity and thereby alters their thoughts, dreams, and other experiences not directly linked to said activity.
i think "turning into a pumpkin" is my new favorite way to articulate the state of things when I am at a function and very overstimulated and it feels like my brain is melting. it's like no i can't be a person anymore i have to leave i'm turning into the pumpkin. the time is up yeah i gotta go. yeah see u later. pumpkin time.
29th June 2026.
This year's Strawberry Moon was extremely low in the sky, which made it look very large and bright. (A perfect photographic opportunity!)
