#needlesandnilbogs

[fishy-my-wishy]

tell me about “I Live On The Moon”…

I Live On The Moon

This is supposed, emphasis on supposed, to be the second part of a two-shot that immediately comes after But I take it and I want it and I love when it bleeds 

***

Rumi stands in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame. 

Her arms are uncovered, in an old band shirt, patterns dull.

Celine can’t say that she’s not proud of her.

“Rumi.” Celine should say something else. Anything else. She’s the parent here, it shouldn’t be on Rumi to do anything but exist.

She should ask if Rumi’s eaten. She should say she’s sorry. She should say anything that doesn’t sound like an accusation or a plea.

Instead, she swallows against the metallic taste and forces her voice to work.

“You look…” The word catches. She starts again. “You look well.”

It’s not enough. It’s nothing. But it’s all she can manage without her voice breaking.

Rumi’s gaze flicks to the bottle, then back to Celine. “you…don’t.” Rumi winces as she says the word, as if expecting some kind chastising.

Celine doesn’t give her one. She just stands there, the words settling between them like dust. She can hear her breathing come out in shallow puffs. 

“I’ve had worse days,” she says finally, and it’s the closest she can get to the truth without laying herself bare.

Rumi’s fingers tighten on the doorframe, her eyes firmly on the floor. She doesn’t step closer, but she doesn’t leave either.

Celine glances at the bottle, then back at Rumi. “Do you want me to go?”

Rumi’s head shoots up, eyes wide. “You want to leave?” she whispers, as if Celine will disappear if she’s any louder.

“What?” Celine whispers back. Yes, of course Celine wants to leave, but only to keep causing Rumi any pain. To keep Rumi from having to suffer her presence after doing so for so long. She pushes herself off the counter until she’s just a few feet away from Rumi, as if there’s an invisible line she’s not allowed to cross. “No, Rumi. Of course not.”

Celine tries to be strong, to be reassuring. But she feels awful and all she wants is to lie in her misery. “But it’s okay if you don’t want me here.” There’s a lump in Celine’s throat as she says this, but she forces it down. 

Rumi stays silent for a moment, eyebrows furrowed. 

She looks up and meets Celine’s eyes. 

Her eyes are glossy, but she doesn’t blink. “I didn’t say that,” Rumi says finally, her voice so soft it almost folds into the hum of the refrigerator.

Celine exhales through her nose, slow, careful, as if any sudden movement might shatter the moment. “I just… don’t want to make things harder for you.”

[specialagentartemis]

favorite thing from conference?

Met some first-year masters students who helped set up the exhibits at the [redacted] tribal museum, which was super cool to hear is up and running for real because I did fieldwork for the [redacted] reservation for several summers which among other things included making maps and artifact lists for interpretive information for the tribe to decide if they wanted the stuff in the museum, but the museum was constantly under construction with an unclear funding future for yearssss so it was really cool to hear it's up and running and see this student's poster about how the exhibit came out!

The other coolest thing was attending a forum on Queer Archaeology and then afterward one of the presenters came over to me and said "[Artemis]?? Is that you?" And I was like uhhh yes who. are you. And she said We went to undergrad together! I worked on your senior thesis excavation! I was not out as a woman back then! and I went OH! So that was really cool. Meeting someone from 10 years ago and they're a different gender now is something that I feel like comes up as a fiction trope idea on tumblr periodically but it's real and it's sweet.

[rainbow-magic-polls]

it’s really nice to look at the newer fairies and go, no, they’re not all white any more, they’re not all the same except for outfit and hair color. Would still love more diversity (when will we get fairies that ARENT religious fairies that have visible religious outfits, when will we get disabilities that aren’t just wheelchairs, etc) but it’s so important to see the demographic changes over the decades

i concur!

i will say that there's at least one special edition/one-off fairy (Nur the Vlogger Fairy) who wears a hijab.

there's also more disability representation than you may have noticed. a lot of them aren't very obvious on the covers (especially the new ones that don't show their full bodies), but for example Sara the Party Games Fairy has a prosthetic leg and Harper the Confidence Fairy (a one-off who isn't in this tournament) has Down syndrome. a full list is here (although the wiki editors should probably see about wording the title more neutrally :/). apparently even one of the new main characters Gracie was born without a left hand

obviously the default is still fairies who are nondisabled and wear western outfits, and that doesn't reflect real life in a way that's important for kids to see in these types of books--i just want to point out that they have better representation, these days, than you might have previously thought :)

[rithmatistkalyna]

book asks 4?

@ilovedthestars You both asked for 4, which is "what sections of a bookstore do you browse?" My favorite local bookstore always has several displays in the front with new releases, staff recommendations, things like "blind date with a book" packages, and things that are relevant to current events. I usually start there. I don't often end up getting anything from the displays (unless one of those new releases is something I've been wanting), but they are always interesting! That bookstore combines fantasy and sci fi together and has two sff sections. The first looks like you might expect a sff section to look at a new and used bookstore with mostly new books and a few used ones tucked in with them. The second is a back room that is packed with used books. If I'm short on time I just go to the first, but its fun to sift through the second. When I have time I also enjoy browsing the cookbook section and the books on crafting. Sometimes I'll wander through the kids books section - there are a lot of absolutely gorgeous kids books. More books for adults should come with pretty art!

[kalynaanne]

trick or treat?

You get the Petersen Graph! There are lots of pretty embeddings of it on MathWorld

Petersen Graph -- from Wolfram MathWorld

The Petersen graph is the cubic graph on 10 vertices and 15 edges which is the unique (3,5)-cage graph (Harary 1994, p. 175), as well as the

[specialagentartemis]

My first year of ArtFight!

This is Kraken, aka Bharadwaj from @needlesandnilbogs's Murderbot Diaries superhero AU! This is Bharadwaj in her bitten-by-a-radioactive-octopus form.

[specialagentartemis]

so you talk about Sirena Halcyon a lot but I feel like I know nothing about her and her story. who is she and why is she not the main character of her media if she’s the one stuck down in the middle of the ocean for a decade?

I AM SIRENA HALCYON’S #1 FAN

Sirena is from the audio drama podcast Primordial Deep by Jordan Cobb, which released a single season in 2021 and then went on indefinite hiatus as such podcasts are wont to do :(

It’s okay. Solid 6/10. Lyrical narration, cool concepts, clumsy character work, too much flirting I do not find interesting, several scenes of breathtaking edge-of-your-seat tension. But it centers around a set of tropes I love: Dr. Marella Morgan, a marine biologist, gets approached by Kiran Flint, a representative of a shady organization. Deep-sea creatures that shouldn’t still be alive, that haven’t been seen alive since the Mesozoic Era, have started attacking people and washing up on beaches. He’s organizing a deep undersea research crew to go figure out what’s going on. Marella joins on with the small crew stationed on a deep-undersea base called the Tiamat to figure out where these Paleozoic and Mesozoic animals are coming from. Each episode covers another crisis caused by another kind of animal causing problems for the station and the crew; the tone is tense, eerie, and sometimes violent.

And then, as Marella and crew explore the deep, they find another deep-sea station. An old and abandoned-looking one. One also called Tiamat.

Hm. They don’t like this!

They go aboard. It’s creepy. They get messages from a man who appears to be trapped in a lower level! There are people alive in here?? The crew splits up to check it out… and Marella’s group gets ambushed by a feral woman who attacks them, chains them up, and tries to use them as crocodile bait. Marella eventually gets through to her, and she starts treating them like allies against the man who’s been talking to them, a man who is not a victim and in fact has a terrible secret.

This woman is Sirena Halcyon. She is in 2 whole episodes of this show and she is my favorite.

Her story is, in the context of the show, backstory: ten years ago, she was on the first Tiamat mission down into the deep. But then one of their scientists, Collin Gharial, found a Weird Artifact, or weird power, it’s kind of unclear, that kind of… mindmelded with him weirdly and put him in tune with the animals of the ancient deep, and he can use this power to turn people into prehistoric sea creatures. Which He Does, with gusto. Classic case of being corrupted by the amulet. All the rest of the crew were either killed by the creatures Collin created, or were turned into creatures themselves. (Collin turned himself into, basically, a crocodile centaur.) Sirena, as the last survivor, eventually barricaded Collin into his lab, and they’ve been in this lonely abandoned undersea stalemate for ten years.

So Sirena isn’t the protagonist—Marella is. But Sirena is the one who CAPTIVATES my imagination because holy shit, what a combination of factors that are catnip to me. And we get outlines and hints of her past that were probably planned to be explored more in future seasons (the end of season 1 drops some tantalizing hints about a larger conspiracy) but it’s unclear if those future seasons will ever happen. So for now it’s just me being obsessed with this woman at the bottom of the ocean, stubbornly and desperately surviving trapped in this place for ten years with the man who killed her whole crew. And also a bunch of prehistoric sea creatures.

The vast majority of what I actually write about her is stuff I have extrapolated (i.e. made up). But she continues to compel me!

[specialagentartemis]

☕️ about pots or sherds?

I mean if you WANT my 24,000 words of thoughts about pots and sherds… 😆

My opinion about pots and sherds… I have many. My big opinion is that they’re legitimately so cool for how they show changes in technology and artistic trends over time. You can see just how fast styles can change, trends can rise and fall, and people innovate. And this was true in the past just as much as it is now! Nobody in the past was an automaton just churning out cost-effective survival strategies, people had ideas and artistic visions and if you have good dendrochronology dates and stratigraphic control you can see how those changed over the course of decades.

My other opinion is more of a fear: that pots are over-studied and everything there is to say about them already has been said so what am I adding.

My OTHER other opinion is tearing my hair out that nobody has talked about this one specific design thing I’ve noticed about archaeological Southwest US pots!! it’s been mentioned like twice ever and both times kind of dismissed in a “but that’s a bit beside the point I’m talking about right now” kind of way. NO IT’S INTERESTING AND IT’S A REAL GAP IN THE LITERATURE, WHY HAS NOBODY ELSE TALKED ABOUT THIS!!!

My other opinion is that I just made some milk pitchers out of clay and they pour really badly and I am more sad than I want to admit. I need to learn fluid dynamics I guess