Terrible, Beautiful Sparks in Space

Talk shit get bit. ey/em they/them Ao3 link

[vincentpriceofficial]

Had an overall pleasant vampire dream in which Claudia and Madeleine never died and every so often the characters would kinda rearrange themselves and go pair up w a different person if they were getting bored or having issues w their current companion. All of which is very sensible and reasonable. However at one point MADELEINE AND LESTAT spend like decades together

which now I’m awake is making me insane and also making me very sad that Claudia and Madeleine didn’t live long enough to have deranged immortal marital spats like “I’m so mad at you I’m going to go fuck your dad for TWENTY YEARS!!”

[creekfiend]

I'm so glad that that truncated fucking ran-into-a-wall-at-speed tadpole-ass looking squirrel only lives in high altitude forests in Borneo bc this means I am extremely unlikely to encounter one in my day to day life. thank god

[tuftedpygmysquirrel]

Hello.

[creekfiend]

DID YOU MAKE THIS BLOG SIMPLY TO TORMENT ME

[tuftedpygmysquirrel]

I can go upside down.

[creekfiend]

WHERE IS THE REST OF YOU

[e-seal-deactivated20210319]

Where does lasagna come from?

Wizards from a mystical land barely tethered to this reality wrote great spells in tomes called “cookbooks” that anyone can cast

[hollowtones]

thought it comes from caves

[hollowtones]

am i thinking of QUARTZ again

[e-seal-deactivated20210319]

easy mistake

[hollowtones]

ah, nuts

[hollowtones]

(coincidentally nuts also comes from caves)

[e-seal-deactivated20210319]

you are thinking of quartz again

[hollowtones]

[wordfather]

just found out that accidentally in love by counting crows was literally made for shrek. they didnt just choose it. it didnt exist before. they asked counting crows to make a song for shrek 2 and thats how we got one of the best songs ever made. insane.

[wordfather]

counting crows knew shrek 2 would become one of the best movies ever made and had to act accordingly

[hollowboobtheory]

ok but like. there are two different types of privilege. there's type a "everybody should have this, but some people don't" and type b "nobody should have this, but some people do"

there's having parents who can pay for your application to any college, and then there's having parents who can bribe your way into any college. there's owning your own home, and then there's owning 50 houses and getting rich off hoarding a vital resource. there's not fearing for your life whenever cops are around, and then there's being the cop and being allowed to murder anyone at any time.

idk i just feel like that's an important distinction to make.

[kuttithevangu]

Read a YA novel which was about the murder of a child but you could feel the editor gently telling the author to step back from any confirmation that the child in question (who, again, was murdered) (the book was about this) had experienced CSA. This is because many people unconsciously believe that murder is not real. And therefore it is ok to talk about, because it is fictional. Whereas CSA, an experience that by definition only children can undergo, IS real, and therefore must never be spoken about, except if a child comes to you and tells you it happened, in which case it’s NOT real and they are lying and probably picked it up from a book. Which is why books can never talk about CSA (but it is ok for them to talk about child murder)

[see-arcane]

Inspired by this lovely post, because I think it encapsulates Dracula and Jonathan’s whole deal over the length of the Vampire Hell Staycation.

[afterword]

[biglawbear]

This is really funny on dark mode

[transfeminine-anarcho-post-egg]

On dark mode this is like a clown trying to hide behind a light pole.

[vidibit]

What's your favourite ridiculous piece of 90s technology?

Thank you so much for the excellent question!! I've been meaning to answer this one for a while, so here goes.

My favourite ridiculous piece of 90s technology is PocketMail! It wasn't that ridiculous at the time, but it's definitely something that could have only existed in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I actually have a PocketMail device, an Oregon Scientific PM-32 that I found on the side of the road in a box full of broken landline telephones!

PocketMail devices were essentially very basic Personal Digital Assistants that allowed you to access your emails without having to use a computer with an internet connection! Here you can see the basic screen and buttons for composing, sending and receiving emails.

But remember, this thing doesn't have Wi-Fi - so how exactly can it access your emails? If you flip the device over, you'll see a strange little speaker thing that flips out...

That's an acoustic coupler! You had to hold the device up to the handset of a landline telephone! So if you had a PocketMail account (with a special email address ending in @pocketmail.com) and were away from your computer/office, you could simply dial the phone number for the PocketMail service on the nearest landline telephone, then hold the device up to the handset so that it can send and receive email data with the email server in the form of audio - and presto! You have just sent an angry last-minute email to your intern for neglecting to look after your Tamagotchi while you were on a business trip to sell Y2K survival kits.

But... what did it sound like? The phone service has long since been shut down after the rise of more capable and portable internet-connected devices, but if you press the little 'Mail' button on the top of the device, you can still hear the sounds of this poor, obsolete little thing trying to reach out and communicate in the only way it knows how to:

AUDIO WARNING: LOUD

Kind of creepy, isn't it?

[dqnquality]

[vincent2845]

[playlander]

[fatfangs]

the way im incapable of having a conversation about weight with normal people. those conversations feel like a mine field because there are no right answers. im not gonna feel sorry for you that you gained weight and i dont have any dieting tips and your self depreciating weight jokes arent funny and i dont feel like congratulating you on your weight loss with how mean to your past self you are being and it doesnt feel good that you think that me wanting to gain weight is weird or stupid. sorry

[animentality]

[chimaerakitten]

I think one of the things especially well done in The Goblin Emperor is that it’s an in-depth depiction of extremely rigid etiquette around a monarch that isn’t intended to signal that the monarch is an asshole.

Like, ok, a lot of SFF includes characters getting suddenly elevated to a position of power they weren’t socialized for, and every time it happens I want to see how it changes their relationships and how they deal with it when the way people treat them shifts.

And I don’t mean in like a hackneyed kid’s-cartoon “the family got rich suddenly and now the kid’s an asshole” way, I mean… well, you’re now Everyone’s Boss, or you’re the guy who just became vitally important to the rebellion because you can blow up planets with your mind. Maybe your closest friends would still be casual with you but a lot of other people won’t be, and while you can encourage people to not get overly bootlicky to you, the one thing you can’t do is demand they be casual since that is just as much an abuse of power as demanding groveling.

Which is why it’s so annoying when a story chickens out and goes with either “this character is an asshole so they demand formality and therefore groveling” or “this character is nice so they don’t demand anything and everyone treats them the same. Don’t worry about it.”

Like, formality around people in positions of power didn’t develop solely because in ye olden days we had the divine right of kings. That’s part of it sure, but formality is also protective, and I don’t mean for the monarch. If there are rules about how you interact with someone below you in a hierarchy, those rules protect both of you. It makes it easier to not accidentally fuck up an interaction in a way that gets someone stabbed by a bodyguard, or referred to HR.

Having formal etiquette established doesn’t necessarily make the people involved assholes, and continuing with a casual atmosphere doesn’t necessarily make the protagonist cool and nice. All of which means people in this situation should struggle with it. Being a cool chill person isn’t a get-out-of-hierarchy-based-social-complications free card.

[guess2who-me-haha]

Not a single moment in time where the Doctor was actually “the last of the Time Lords”, he just enjoys martyrdom.

[sea--burn]

how it feels to stop tossing and turning and get up to piss

[chilewithcarnage]

[txttletale]

at some point it became a very common talking point that science fiction and fantasy ought to Represent Trans People and that exploring Weird Gender Shit without also depicting characters who are legibly transgender in Normal Ways is passé. and honestlyyyy i don't care give me a hundred more male characters possessed by female ghosts or nonbinary robots or whatever. literally what is the point of the scifi fantasy genre if you cannot connect to the fantastical

[txttletale]

if i wanted to read about people being transgender without a wizard being involved i would open my tumblr dash. Representation will kill the reader she needs a guy who accidentally downloaded the memories of a woman on the CyberLine and can't tell them apart from his own to live

[shetheyslain]

Dahling you simply must read this book! It’s all about this devious little caterpillar who simply gorges himself on all manner of divine things

[batsandboba]