Caffeinated Otter

"People have to get comfortable with having unlikely allies"

if people are going to get comfortable alongside people they *have clear reason not to trust*, they are first going to need the clarity not to be misled that doing so makes those people allies. You Too Can Find People Temporarily Useful

Apparently the Cursed Thought For The Day is "Given the Borg, Tumblr teens on Star Trek must have some *amazing* slapfights about how problematic drone kink is"

enrichment “Frangible is such a lovely word for a girl,” the voice in Tina’s earpiece says with silky menace, and Tina pauses, just for a moment, over the access panel...

enrichment #writing #Starship #Robot

I think the fucking tragedy of relying on Gamers™ for a principled stand is epitomised by the fact Riot are still even in business to do Mastercard's dirty work

I cited Cyberqueen as a precursor when talking to someone yesterday!

tarnished and afraid (VIII) “You are utterly out of your nut-buttered motherfucking mind,” Becca tells her.

tarnished and afraid (VIII) #writing #Robot #Cyberpunk

book cover for Wiccette next to a block of text that reads: Does the Goddess of transfemininity deserve to be saved? Despite all the girls she denies the magic of transition? Kate, one of the Goddess's rejects, needs that answer, and soon. Witches are looking to grind her into grist for their magic, and innocent lives might be caught in their millstone.

As part one of Wiccette wraps up, here's a lil blurb for part two!
Catch up before then here:
www.scribblehub.com/series/13172...

Book cover that reads: Up On Hogh Mountain, by Anne T. Androgen. The background is a mirrored series of pillars

Between other projects, I went briefly insane and wrote a novella! It's about toxic lesbian love, gruesome murder, and being stuck in an eldritch mega-church.

you can get it on itch or on amazon here:
anneandrogen.itch.io/up-on-high-mountain
www.amazon.com/dp/B0DHRJQP2S
#queerwriters #writersky

Even the most desperately poor will pay for art that's *already* made them enrichingly insane for it, but something with the unseen possibility that it might turn out just meh is a hard sell when it's literally and measurably coming out of this month's calories

when the notionally same audience for both works is comprised of people notoriously living within sight of their financial extinction horizon at all times.

Musing (in an unjudgemental and genuinely wondering way) whether works entirely published via print and/or a Patreon parasocial author access subscription are just, practically, incapable of being comparably cited as influences when compared to works released freely and only post-hoc monetised—

perfectlynormal_innerframe_sketch.jpg

[points at the rapidly solidifying definition and expansion of cyberpunk as a thing in its own right in the 80s] these white boys are all doing fake science fiction. because of their shallow pool of references

Their limited pool of references/Our noble and nuanced appreciation solely of toy commercials for preteens

I can't overstate how much the malevolent dipshit irony hurts in my brain when The Usual Suspects go "um actually mechsploitation isn't Real Genre, trans girls only know AC6"

Oh, does somebody who can't recognise they're reading *queer genre horror* want to talk about limited frames of reference?

I'd have a sack of nickels large enough to use as a novelty Soulslike nerd-beating weapon

If I had a nickel for every time a dubiously-literate nerdbaby who's never heard of Empty Spaces and actively wouldn't read any transfem horror whined that mechsploitation's inspirations are a too-small pool because it's not tractable to a "wow, cool robot" reading,

All nerds know is obsessively build lore wiki, cite it as authority to gatekeep, eat hot chip, and agree that the problem with the left is that it has no plan to mandate sacrificial sex victims for repulsive cishet men

It's so trivially true that I could post this every day without so much as looking at Tumblr, and I'd always be right

There is no amount of sulky "um actually I just hate it because literally all of the totally coincidentally transfem writers I hate are arriviste posers with a [checks latest phrasing of excuse] 'shallow pool of genre references'" that even really tries to disguise what's up

Oh is tumblr doing another interminable round of "um actually it's objectively fine for me to specifically, vocally hate filthy trans girlies having fun writing mechs because they can't name three of mech anime's albums [trans women do that] no those are objectively the WRONG ones,"

The saying has never been "one bad apple? Oh gosh, he always seemed sus to *me,* guess he was No True Ingroup Member all along,"

You're not gonna see that evidence until the Glorious Revolution is already in a position to hang people — and not then, if the ancien regime can burn any remaining shreds quick enough — because nobody in the ruling class wants to *precipitate* the Glorious Revolution setting up the ropes

You know why that low-hanging fruit is gonna rot on the tree? Same reason none of those "left" parties went after the Panama Papers tax-dodgers.

The results of being in a position of sufficient power to arbitrarily Get Away With have no partisan differentiation

I'm having another moment of "oh yeah, real people without Lebensunwerten Neurotype Brain only do basic pattern matching when forced to"

You know what would be a real crowd-pleaser by literally any "left" party in the world? A serious push to expose those perps.

I just saw somebody (over on fedi) pointing out that, *if* actual criminally-implicating material relating to Epstein's clients ever makes it to public view, smug Democrats need to be braced for years of defending Clinton to suddenly also look Real Bad

Subdermal (III) Margaret takes a couple of personal days and goes on a little road trip.

Subdermal (III) #writing #SuperHero #SuperVillain

One of my favorite thing is leaving huge, gaping holes in a story. Letting the reader see the shape of what's there but nothing more. Writing around those empty spaces.

Today I offer you 1.3k words of ... well, you can figure it out, can't you?
maybeelse.site/words/how-th...

Having one of those Fun Breathing evenings which make my housemate ask if I should take some kind of meds, because it sounds like I might collapse or something

To which the answer is: lol, there isn't really anything. (Also, if you THINK it sounds bad, it's probably not — if it was, you'd KNOW.)

Turns out I can cheer myself up by re-reading some of my writing and laughing at my own jokes 😌