Mouse on a Moose

I'm Mouse on a Moose. I'm NNM on AO3. She/Her. I reblog things that make me feel good about humanity. Also, dogs and other animals count as "humanity" when I feel like it. Also, I've written some fanfic that people have liked, so I talk about that sometimes. Also, I am a distressingly fanatic fan of the podcast, Finish It!, and I really would like you to listen to it.

[mouseonamoose]

Hello! I discovered Demonology yesterday and finishied it in one (very long) sitting. I know you get a lot of asks regarding this but I felt had to write something as well. I have some experience with therapy but I am generally not very hopeful about it, reading the whole process of it (with characters I adore) made me a little bit more hopeful, and that is very significant to me, just wanted to tell you that :,)

Thank you for writing it I suppose, I'm willing to bet it was healing for a lot of people...

Also, what is your novel about?? I would love to read it too, if it's alright with you of course.

I am so glad you are feeling more hope! That means so much. Thank you.

The novel I wrote is about ghosts in space who need therapy. Er... Let me try to actually do some sort of description of it.

It's about a therapist without much life experience who has been hired by a hyper-religious organization to go around in a spaceship and help ghosts (who are out in space, natch) move over into the great beyond. It doesn't go well, and she doesn't feel at home with the rest of the spaceship's crew. But then they encounter a strange, dangerous anomaly, and she and the crew have to come to understand each other and work together in order to overcome it.

So, to anyone who is impressed with how I've written two POV characters who are therapists and who have radically different personalities and approaches to their work: this is apparently my hat trick, so come on down if you'd like to see it done the third time.

(Send me a direct message or an email, if you want to read it. :-)

[vintagewildlife]

"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?

This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.

[mouseonamoose]

Imagine being someone who takes the time to leave a 1 star review online for a Starbucks because the barista didn't greet you when you arrived.

[pregnanthudsonwilliams]

not naming names but some of you are so creative and talented it's an honor to have you in my phone

[farewell-to-lorien]

Talking to Ghosts, by Sienna Gonzales.

[spiralthephantom]

Beautiful comic about forgiving yourself. I hope this finds whoever needs it.

[mouseonamoose]

On a lark, for July 4, I decided to rewatch Hamilton for the first time in six years. This was a mistake.

I'm now on day eight of having THE ENTIRE MUSICAL stuck in my head.

[mikimeiko]

Mrs. Davis | Miniseries (2023), Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof

[mouseonamoose]

Mrs. Davis is a show on Peacock in which a magician nun seeks the Holy Grail in order to try to destroy a world-controlling AI. It's beautiful and wild and unlike anything I've seen in a long, long time.

Just look at those gifs, above! This show should be all over Tumblr

[mouseonamoose]

Demonology triphasic is a million times better than the finale that left us all needing to see Aubrey Thyme

"Trauma survivors often find themselves stuck in an in-between space, an uncomfortable gap between what was and what now is. Trauma survivors want to return to the old world, to the world they had lived in before the trauma. They want to return to that feeling of innocence and safety, that feeling of naivete, before they learned just how cruel and senseless this world could be. Trauma survivors, often, also want to shed that old world like dead skin, to reject it and move on from it, to create for themselves some brand new life, some thoroughly new world completely divorced from the one they previously knew. 

They can’t. They can’t do either. You can’t return to the world that was, but you also can’t create the world anew. You can’t ignore the reality of what happened, of what you lost, of how much you care about what was lost. You can’t. This final task of grieving, this fourth task of locating a meaningful path forward, requires that path to stay within that in-between space, that space in which memories of what was can be wedded to hopes and dreams for the future. It requires learning how to be comfortable with both what was and what can be, rejecting neither but accepting both. It is only in that in-between space, between the world that was lost and the dream of a world created wholly anew, that trauma survivors can come to accept their feelings of grief."

[aromanticduck]

You have to read all the books in your bedroom before you can leave. How long will you be trapped?

There's no books in there, I can leave immediately

Less than a day

1-3 days

4-6 days

1-3 weeks

4-7 weeks

2-3 months

4-6 months

7-11 months

1-2 years

3 years or more

Results

Voting ended onJun 27

You can't die from hunger or thirst or lack of medication etc.

It doesn't matter which books you've already read. You have to read them all, starting from now.

Physical books only - if you have an e-reader in there you don't have to read your entire digital library.

[mouseonamoose]

Oh my God. This made me realize the only book I have in my bedroom is the DSM. This is not how a person should live.

[honourablejester]

I don’t know why that affected me so strongly, but I’m watching a youtube video on disasters on Lake Huron, and the first one involves a coal freighter that was lost in the White Hurricane of 1913 called the SS Argus. Everyone on the ship was lost. But it’s mentioned that the captain’s body washed up later, and was found without a life jacket. So they thought, based partly on testimony of another ship that thought they saw them go down, that it just happened too fast for him to have time to get his jacket. But then another body was found, that of the second cook, and she was found wearing the life jacket marked ‘captain’. And that’s …

It didn’t work. It didn’t save her. But it’s so very possible that he spent his last moments alive trying to save someone else, one of his crew, and they probably both knew that it wouldn’t work, that there wasn’t a lot of hope in a blizzard on the lakes in November, but he tried … he tried anyway. Even if it did nothing but maybe make her body easier for her family to find.

You know that Mr Rogers thing of ‘look for the helpers’? How many times has someone, facing the end, done something tiny and fragile and maybe hopeless just to try and help someone else? Whether it works or not. How many people went to their graves at least trying?

That has to say something about us. As a people. As monstrous as we sometimes (perhaps often) are, so many times we were also …

Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world.

And sometimes you can’t save one life, sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes there’s no getting out of this for anyone, but … try anyway. Because it matters anyway.

And maybe no one will ever know. But maybe also some day more than a century down the line, maybe some idiot will be crying into her coffee because of what you died trying.

[mouseonamoose]

"So much suffering has been caused by nuclear war, we should remake the universe without uranium!"

Oh yeah? Have you thought through the consequences of this? Can you even imagine what it would look like, to have laws of physics and physical circumstances that involved no uranium?

"We should remake the universe without gravity, so no one gets hurt by falling down!"

Yeah? And what else would happen, if there was no gravity? What are you even imagining, when you talk about a world without gravity? Do you honestly think there can be anything approaching life as we know it in a universe with no gravity? Seriously!?!

Anyway, that's what I assume it sounds like, in a universe where the Bible is literally true, to suggest remaking the world so there's no celestial influence.

[reading-writing-revolution]

[olfactoryventriloquism]

So, I’ve been obsessed with Pratchett since I was 15. That’s 23 years for those keeping count. I just finished GO3 and these are my initial thoughts:

Crowley and Aziraphale becoming human: I don’t love, but you could argue that that was what he planned, and I would buy it. It does follow some of his themes.

But there is a knife’s edge that Pratchett balanced between fury and compassion. He absolutely loved humanity, but he also hated what humans did to each other out of malice, spite, or even laziness. Good Omens the novel was filled to bursting with that.

The end here lacked all of that somehow. God in S1 is unknowable, but God is S3 is just a capricious bitch who seems to have it out for Crowley specifically and through him Aziraphale. The viewer certainly gets angry at God, but the narrative seems to be that, while cold, she is doing the right thing and giving them their happy ending. And while Crowley expresses compassion for humanity, it falls on such deaf ears that the narrative doesn’t actually support that.

The closing sentiment seems to be that we can make their lives better by just erasing all their trauma and baggage. No. Sam Vimes did not pull himself out of the gutter and bodily hold himself out of it every day to be told that actually amnesia would be best. If you wanted to make them human: make them keep their memories. That would have been fine.

Terry would have Crowley and Aziraphale say “fuck you” to God and protect the earth as it was. The way they protected Job’s children. The way they did at Tadfield Airbase. Here they just throw in the towel and start a new universe. They accept their failure so quickly as to be farcical.

And you will never ever convince me that TERRY PRATCHETT would have allowed the words “a story shouldn’t live past its ending” to be spoken without the speaker being immediately eaten by a banshee.

[armageddidnt]

Terry Pratchett Facts

[mouseonamoose]

Season 1 ends with an act of choice: Adam chooses to reject his "biology," reject the pre-ordained, reject power and supremacy. He chooses, ultimately, to be human. That's all it takes for him: his choice, his expression of his values. That's what decides his humanity, nothing else. The choice doesn't remake his underlying nature: he still has all the supernatural abilities he needs to set the world aright. What defines his humanity is the choice, and the choice alone.

So what are we being told about the nature of humanity, when it is an act of divine will that remakes two supernatural beings into humans?

[goodbyevanny]

I just think that the versions with all the trauma, suffering and history deserved a happy ending. I don’t think the take away should be that the only way to get a happy ending is for those things to have never happened to you.

[mouseonamoose]

you liking this is so funny

no, but seriously, it's that or turn into the Joker, you know?

[mouseonamoose]

This is about Good Omens, surprisingly

I am right now living through the beginning of the end of the worst year of my life. This is something I say as an expression of hope: hopefully, I won't have any years worse than the one that is now starting to end. Hopefully, this is about as bad as it gets.

Just about a year ago, my husband began displaying symptoms of encephalitis. That's inflammation of the brain, and having your brain inflamed is the sort of thing that, sometimes, you don't ever come back from. This past year has been so grueling and terrible. And now, as of 13 days ago, I have started living in an apartment by myself. My husband and I have been together for over 20 years. Now we're not. The past year has been extremely painful.

There's a lot I'm not saying. There's a lot I haven't figured out how to say.

I haven't been in a place to care about the Good Omens finale. How could I be? I have had too much else going on, emotionally and practically. It hasn't mattered to me, because it couldn't matter to me, because right now I am doing the terrible work of carving out a better future for myself, just a little crevice of security and peace for me and my dogs. I am overcome with the weight of a 20 year history--an eternity, it feels like-- which somehow grows heavier as it dissolves away. I am remaking myself, because I have to.

Right now, I'm tired of loss as a prerequisite for survival. I am full up to my gills with rebirth. I want to be comforted by a story in which saving the world requires no sacrifice.

There's a story that I love where an angel and a demon are exactly who they are, and they don't have to lose anything they care about for the good of the world. This is a story in which the future they win for themselves is the culmination of their pasts, a continuation of all they have always been. Their future is free, because it is a future in which they get to be unquestionably, unerringly themselves, nothing else. Where they are good enough, precisely as they are, and that is exactly how they love one another.

It turns out, I really need that story right now. I wasn't expecting to wake up this morning and realize that. So I guess it just sucks that, on top of everything else that sucks for me right now, I feel like that's no longer a story I get to have.