Dr. Caoimhe Harlock, Heresiarch of Charybdis

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

Love to cozily drift off to sleep, only to snap awake an hour later feeling completely wired and alert. A wonderful experience!

Watch him in "Winter Light" sometime if you get a chance; he can easily command like 400 years of heartbreak to appear on his face somehow.

The thing he did that impressed me most was completely changing the theme of Haunting of Hill House, making it pro-family instead of entirely about a queer terror of heteronormative domestic duty, and still having me think the show turned out "pretty good." Like, I should totally hate that.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. I have to imagine his following comes more from just being like a "he reliably won't totally fuck this up or anything"-tier creator than from being someone making great work? Because yeah, otherwise, I don't know either.

I don't dislike him but the endless monologues get WILD at a certain point, like damn near self-parody. That was especially the case in Midnight Mass, I thought.

Quote this with the first four Horror movies that come to your mind that are 10/10s for you. No cheating. Just the first four that pop into your head.

Hellraiser
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The Blob (1988)
Night of the Comet

The lovely @asmilewithoutacat.bsky.social and @canineconnie.bsky.social commissioned this sketch of me from the great @twist.dog at the furry convention they're currently at ;_; Is so cute ;_;

In the background, a classroom. In the foreground, a laptop featuring Donald Duck's face with a pentagram emerging from his third eye. A still from the 1960s animated short, "Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land."

Taught my class about Donald Duck and the burning pentagram today.

‘Achilles, the son of Thetis, however, they honoured and sent to the Isles of the Blest.48 For when he found out from his mother that if he killed Hector he too would die, but if he did not kill him he would return home and live to old age, he nevertheless dared to make the choice of standing up for his lover Patroclus49 and avenging him; thus 180a he also died, and died for his sake. (Aeschylus actually talks nonsense when he asserts that it was Achilles who was the lover of Patroclus: Achilles was not only more beautiful than Patroclus but also more 42 As Apollo into Aeneas at Iliad 20.110. 43 ‘those in love’, in Greek hoi erontes; see eran. 44 philia; see philein. 45 eros. 46 psuche. 47 arete. 48 In Greek myth, islands in the legendary far west of the Greek world where after death specially favoured mortals, notably some of the heroes, pass a blissful afterlife, rather than having a phantom existence in the Underworld like everyone else. 49 Homer in the Iliad did not make Achilles and Patroclus lovers, but Aeschylus represents them as such in Myrmidons, a lost tragedy from which a few quotations survive. The Symposium (‘The Drinking Party’) 10 beautiful than all the rest of the heroes, and still beardless; and according to Homer he was much younger.50)

Just rereading The Symposium and was reminded of the wonderful fact, which I had forgot, that even the ancient Greeks had drama in their fanfic communities about who would top and who would bottom. All men are brothers, human nature is eternal.

Because it fuckin rules

Bonus "Genre Fiction" Edition:

- "Magic systems" are always bad.

Secondly, pre-stocked signifiers like "hetero couple" or "the family" aren't meaningful on their own. You can't expect readers to value those things just because. You have to put in the work to make them real and specific. Way too many widely-lauded works fail to do this.

A lot of stories read as if the writer has lost the distinction between subtlety and cowardice and is afraid that writing actual scenes will make them seem artless or ideological. It is okay to believe things and have characters respond to the world in ways other than befogged helpless dissociation.

Slept the Full Fellini (a rarity for me) last night, strong sleep, deep sleep, good sleep. Then woke up and realized I slept through therapy u_u A girl can't win.

Screenshot from Columbo. He his talking to his dog, which is sitting is the drivers seat of a car. “Okay, I’m gonna put you in charge. You take care of the car. You’re a responsible dog. When I get back, if the car’s okay, I’ll give you another cookie.”

“If the car’s gone,”

“I’ll give you another cookie anyway”

“because I love you.”

Happy Columbo’s Day

There's a quote about This Very Thing you said like 20 years ago in an IRC chat that I think about, at minimum, once a fucking week, but I won't repeat it here without your say-so. I'll text it to you if you want tho :3

It's doing good for me as well. Also the winds blew a bunch of leaves down in people's yards.

I want to arrange for you to say this somewhere publicly, so I can rise up and clap, tears in my eyes, embarrassingly snorting out "SAY IT AGAIN! SAY IT AGAIN!"

1. Mushrooms, which I understand is my loss :(
2. Rob Zombie's "El Superbeasto"; I reject the based/cringe binary, but this made me physically cringe, a lot.
3. Not a hot take but "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime" is disgraceful. Criminal.

Have you seen that CNN video where the live bombing of Kyiv is disrupted by an ad for Applebee's blaring "Chicken Fried" at peak volume? I played it for a class to show them "this is the kind of discordant weirdness you should stock your brain with as a writer." They all said it was "very American."

(By which I mean, I had the Skeletor version of this exact same thing.)

Real ones know.

It's gonna take more than donuts; she needs a bird-based daily delivery service from the local bakery that brings tortes, cinnamon rolls, etc. directly to her window.

Apocalypse dreams aren't at all uncommon for me, but this was the first specifically climate-related one so far as I can remember.

I had my first climate-related nightmare. Someone was just calmly explaining to me how "the autumn that was starting has now been obliterated," that "there was an anomalous wave of heat we didn't see coming and all the leaves instantly died" and they didn't think the trees would come back in spring.

About to start my Brundlefly Arc.

Truly the GOAT. I will never forgive them for taking FF12 away from Matsuno in the eleventh hour.

Is it the Severin Blu-Ray you have with that menu?

What's it about? (I know I could google it but --)