#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 :)

[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

[specialagentartemis]

trick or treat! (tell me something about your no longer prehistoric murderbot au)

Ice Age Murderbot AU kind of. Bifurcated into two different things haha.

The one where still-with-the-Company Murderbot is in transit and experiences a wormhole malfunction and gets dropped 20,000+ years in Earth's past, to meet AU!PresAux on this cold, technology-less planet, and it's freaking out about that... it still exists! I think it's super interesting!... for different reasons than I find the Ice Age Origfic Story interesting, lol.

Murderbot POV on being fully free but on the condition of being separated from the rest of the universe forever - no new media, no feed, no medical repair technology, nobody who has ever heard of a SecUnit before - combined with it trying to do wilderness survival to help its humans who are much more familiar with the terrain and how to survive her but don't know what germs are, is fascinating to me. It's a different, bitter kind of freedom, free but trapped, and trying to decide what life means for it now.

However, the one-off joke that Paleolithic!PresAux are a bunch of Ice Age humans and Gurathin is the token Neanderthal that hangs out with them made me go. Huh. How did that happen, I wonder.

Then it got a backstory.

Then I wanted to do things with the backstory that I realized having them be 1:1 Pin-Lee, Mensah, Preservation, Makeba, etc. didn't quite allow, and I had more flexibility telling the story I wanted to tell with that if I just. Made them completely original characters in an original setting. This backstory was pre-Murderbot-arriving anyway so it was like five degrees off being a fully original setting anyway!

---

Kurrat is a Neanderthal 30,000 years BP, part of a small and dwindling clan. Most of the other Neanderthals are gone; Kurrat has never known any others besides his own withdrawing, insular group. It has also become authoritarian and paranoid due to the steady and undeniable population decline, inbreeding, and advance of the other people in territories that oral history says used to be their own people's. His mother told him that her mother said that her mother remembered when it wasn't like this, but what good is that now? Kurrat's clan is dying and they all know it and the leader refuses to acknowledge it, instead commanding with increasingly strict expectations of obedience.

And worse, it's a hard winter. It's Bad. The animals have gone elsewhere and the early frosts killed a lot of the foods they could normally count on for much longer. The group leader decides that a sacrifice is in order. Somebody's life needs to be given, their throat slit and their warm lifeblood fed to the hungry earth to bring back the bounty of the world. Also one less mouth to feed in such a hard winter can't hurt either.

They're going to choose the least-liked person in the group to sacrifice and Kurrat knows it's gonna be him. He does not exactly get along well with. Well. Most of the other people in the clan.

So he goes "fuck this shit, I'm out" and votes with his feet, as it were. He leaves on his own before he can get sacrificed.

Course that's not exactly a great prospect when you're already hungry and it's already deep in the winter.

-

Pendíkhia belongs to a human (Homo sapiens, that is) tribe split into three clans; they spend summer together but winter apart. Her clan of ~30 people is in their winter base camp, and they are Not Doing Well. It's a hard winter for them too. They have always come out to the steppes to meet the caribou herds moving south to their winter grazing areas... but this year the caribou aren't here. Trying to figure out where they are is a major preoccupation of most of the clan's hunters right now. A runner has also been sent to the other clans' winter camp are to check in with them and ask for support. They're starving and scared. It's Bad.

But one afternoon Pendíkhia spots a thin trail of smoke rising in the distance. That's... weird. Who's out here?

She and clan leader Narémákhia go out to investigate, see who's here. And they find a man curled up looking fully frozen to death by the sputtering embers of a campfire.

Poor guy. What was he doing out here alone? Was he insane?

Narémákhia walks off to see if he was travelling with anyone else, if there might be any survivors. Pendíkhia is poking around his body to see if he had a pouch of food on him or anything... when this prompts a reflex, a twitch and shudder and huff of breath. Pendíkhia pulls back. Oh, shit. He's not dead. He looked pretty dead but he is actually still alive.

And Pendíkhia looks out to where Narémákhia is. She didn't see this. She thinks this guy is dead and is planning to come back out tomorrow to give him proper burial rites, because she's a good and responsible person and that's why she was chosen as leader. Pendíkhia is the only one who knows the guy isn't dead. She could just... not tell anyone. Nobody has to ever know. The sun is setting. He'll freeze to death overnight, and really, that's a gentle way to go, nicer than starving or dying of an infection from the cold and wet. When Narémákhia comes back tomorrow morning he'll be dead and she'll never know he wasn't. If he's alive, well, then they're honor-bound to take him back to their camp and help him, try to save him, and they're already struggling and suffering, and they don't have the resources or the energy to spare on a stranger.

Their founding narrative is one of being helped when they were driven out of their home by the ice and the water bearing down on them, by joining with other clans to create the tribe as it is now, and their moral center, their founding myth, the thing that is core to who they are, is this duty of welcoming and helping strangers. It's never been hard before. It's never been a choice before. And she can come up with all these reasons that it's better, really, for everybody, to just leave this guy here.

Pendíkhia has a choice to make...