#loaf to void

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one story I keep thinking about but will never write is a portal fantasy where the protagonist has to get back to earth before her prescription runs out

of course, needing to get back to earth for such a specific and adult reason isn't really a part of the genre identity and so it would go one of two ways

As a comedy: Protag is already aware that this happens sometimes. Magic leaking into our world is a well established problem on the scale of a sewage leak. The tiny talking fairy she meets when she falls into not-narnia tells her that she's the prophesized hero destined to defeat the dark lord and she's like lol no

More seriously: This version of the story would not be from our chronically ill protags perspective. Instead it would be from that of an honourable fantasy knight who has to choose between helping this odd woman get home within a month or completing their own important prophesied quest

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an incomplete list of some Things that happened in the olympic opening ceremony

Both Lady Gaga and Celine Dion gave performances

Three teenagers got lost in the catacombs with the olympic flame and got saved by the phantom of the opera

a ménage à trois

20 different pink clad marie antoinettes holding their own chopped off heads watched a metal concert

Dionysius showed up to preach about sobriety??

a guy dressed as Napoleon did BMX tricks

the peace flag was carried by this horsewoman of the apocalypse

The phantom of the opera did parkour. a lot of parkour

3 seperate pianos were rained on

One was on fire

The on fire piano was involved in a very sincere rendition of John Lennon's Imagine

They never actually explained the phantom of the opera bit? I was really expecting him to look different

The minions stole the mona lisa

Are the minions french???

A french man in red white and blue played the accordion while wearing a beret

In conclusion: excellent entertainment, excellent showing off, good luck america trying to top this

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So like, the newly-rouge SecUnit that murderbot runs into in PD has got to be a baby right? Not just thematically (Platform Decay is about choosing to save innocents, Janity's interaction with her father at the end is about who is worthwhile to save) But also in the stupid trusting way it decides to act. It immediately shoves the data packet at murderbot, before accepting murderbots own updates and running away.

I really hope we get to see more of this SecUnit, but Three had a whole crew to help it, Murderbot had more experience, a team, and ART, the B-E unit decided to hide and wait. This unit seems to be both conspicuous and alone - it, like Sofi and Janity and Tula, needed help to get out of the torus, but I worry for it when that help never comes

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fascinating (binge) reading the vorkosigan saga for the first time and finding out that while on the surface its about miles and associated friends/relations getting themselves into and out of military situations it actually often focuses on - or uses - the implications of different reproductive technology

i started writing an essay about this while I was halfway through (which I should rewrite as my initial odd points "where are all the smart barrayan women?" were dealt with in later books) but it is kinda funny to me - especially if you look at the older covers. like the cetaganda cover is: what if you fought a guy with facepaint and then there was a hot lady in a white dress. whereas the plot is: how does the balance of power shift in societies with highly controlled genetic engineering for its upper class? who holds the power in this case? is it the military? the upper caste lords? or the upper caste women who seem to be secluded and yet are able to make the key choices for generations to spread

anyway excellent books

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one thing i did appreciate wrt disability in the vorkosigan saga is that miles never becomes less disabled

he's in a space future, hes able to get some treatments and learn to manage his own emotions about his disability better but despite synthetic bones he ends the series as, if not more, visibly disabled than when the series begins

he no longer has to worry about brittle bones, but now he has controlled seizures and regularly uses a cane

most of these changes happen due to Plot but feel reminiscent to my own experience dealing with a chronic illness. there is a chance I will be able to control my condition using weekly injections, but like miles and his seizure simulator, this is something I will have to manage and plan for across the rest of my life

(also more characters being occasional cane users/cane users who do it for pain management gives me life)

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rereading shards of honour and going insane about dubaurer's (and then miles') seizures

Cordelia spends the first half of the book taking care of an innocent man injured by Barraryaran infighting, refering to him as a kid, helping with his stress induced seizures and eventually getting him back to his family. She refers to the young Barraryaran soldiers as being sent out as sacrificial lambs, and talks about the tragedy of raising a son who will be picked up and made a meal for war.

And then her own son, her child she thought she could raise away from war is injured - disabled - before he is even born. And she knows the Barraryaran opinion on disability, she knows he will keep trying and keep trying to prove himself - and she had to know, at some point, that her son would become another sacrificial lamb for Barrayar. She can not stop him, it would do him too much a disservice, and he gets injured and comes back and gets injured again - a terrifying proposition that relaxes into an unstable equilibrium that is Miles' life - until it tips over and her son dies.

He rises again, the same way he rose against any other impossibility thrown against him, and she cannot stop him running back out there. And it's all fine, all unsettled, situation normal all fucked up, but then her son starts having seizures.

Miles would never notice but the first time he had a seizure around his parents they would know exactly what to do.

And if that broke Cordelia's heart, well miles isn't the first kid she's seen who had seizures as a scar of war

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rereading the enchanted forest chronicles (patricia c wrede) and I always forget how much cimorene imprinted on my child soul

and honestly, not even so much in a blorbo way, but in a this is my standard for princesses (and or female characters dealing with gendered cultural expectations) in fiction way, even though wrede in her introduction to the modern editions explicitly states that she wasnt trying to write a quote-unquote feminist story

In Dealing with Dragons Cimorene is explicitly introduced as a princess who does not want to do proper princess things, and in the hands of a less thoughtful writer this would immediately become a not-like-other-girls story. Except, for all that I'm pretty sure the phrase "not like other princesses" is nearly said explicitly on page this isnt what the story is about. Firstly, its made explicit that princess-like simpering is intensely culturally ingrained and taught, and prince characters are shown to be even more annoying due to the same cultural bounds that they have been taught. Secondly, Cimorene is by far not the only female character we care about in the book, there is even another princess who despite being a bit more traditional than Cimorene still gets to be an important well rounded character. And third, whilst she dislikes the bounds of femininity placed upon her, she doesn't despise femininity in totality. It's the impracticality of being a princess that chafes against her, and amongst all the magic she really doesn't mind mucking in to do femininely coded manual tasks like cooking and cleaning

finally, the book is less about her rebellion against, and more about rebellion towards becoming more of who she is. she's not running away from culturally defined femininity, shes running towards the person who politely argues with dragons, finds practical spells for fireproofing, and provides dragons with both chocolate mousse and cherries jubilee

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the recent game changer episode has enrichment for everyone, but especially for me, a little data nerd who is interested in the way different social media platforms shape different cultures and engagement

and now i get to do one to one comparisons about what people are most horny about, and which social media is the most horny

tumblr where the sexy car wash is only mildly losing out to D20:on a bus seems to currently be winning