akaanir-of-starfleet

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

ok so yesterday my coworker/friend went to go mop and she saw some little things moving in the mop bucket. she looked closer and saw that they were brine shrimp

which is very silly and odd but not quite unexpected because we are aquarists and we have brine shrimp hatching cones that we raise them in to feed our jellies. and sometimes visitors mess with the knobs on the tank and then end up dumping them out (which fills me with RAGE because you can't accidentally do that. you have to be purposefully reaching around the hatching cone so like why the hell are you messing with our stuff but anyways that's not the point) so then we mop them and yeah ok that's how the eggs got into the bucket. but not only have they hatched, they are thriving adults !!!!! and they are thriving so much that some of them even have EGGS!!!!!

ok now here's the kicker

THEY KEEP DYING IN THEIR HATCHING CONES !!!!! SO OUR BATCHES KEEP FAILING!!!!! EVEN WITH THEIR REQUIRED WATER PARAMETERS THEY ARE FAILING. SO. WHY. THE. HELL. ARE THEY ALIVE IN A MOP BUCKET OF ALL PLACES

so you're telling me that our brine shrimp (that keep dying) that we are dutifully caring for with specific water parameters for maximized hatching etc etc etc are so happy in a Mop Bucket that they are fucking ????? these little shrimps are porking on company time in company supplies ???????

(update: my other friend @plaguedocboi took them home yayyy)

^ the soggy children

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

Jason Isaacs in The Patriot (2000)

Tavington’s hobbies; killing people and catching fireflies ^^

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

people get so confused trying to figure out the Lois/Clark/Superman situation that somehow they come to the conclusion that Clark is cheating on Lois with Superman

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

ianthe & corona

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

💪🏾🏆💐.

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

Wikipedia is lost to our friends across the waters.

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

yeah i drive the truck that isekais all those lonely 20yo NEETs and bored salarymen. it’s a really hard job. they keep sending me to workplace counselling after each hit. “it’s normal to feel guilt at ending someone’s life,” they say. how do i tell them that’s not what makes me feel guilty? “but it’s okay. he’ll live a better life in another world.” yeah, with 100 girls who could have lived normal lives but got drafted into being in these boring dudes’ harems. how many women’s lives have i ruined. and they don’t even know. they don’t even know

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

SACABAMBASPIS

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

So a couple Christmases ago, I got an emergency whistle in my stocking. It was supposed to be deafeningly loud, so obviously not the sort of thing you blow on Christmas morning just to see what it sounds like. And let me tell you, pretty much that whole morning, I was dying to blow that whistle. Out of curiosity, and because I wasn't supposed to. The next time I had the house to myself, it was one of the first things I did.

All of this to say, when Susan rode around with her horn strapped to her saddle, I wonder how often she was intrusively tempted to just pick it up and blow it? Was is hard to run around Narnia with a horn she was only supposed to blow when she was definitely, seriously, for-real in danger?

And more to the point, what about Caspian? Did he ride away from Dr. Cornelius with a little voice in the back of his head going blow the horn dude c'mon just blow it find out what it sounds like c'mon dude?

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

As a transmasc fag, I consider transfem butches like. ok this is gonna be specific lol. In my culture we have cross cousins and parallels cousins. Cross cousins are your mom’s brother’s kids or dad’s sister’s kids, and parallel cousins are mom’s sister’s kids and dad’s brother’s kids. Your parallel cousins are addressed with the same terms as your literal siblings, and you usually grow up very close with them.

To me, other transmasc fags are my same gender parallel cousins/brothers (nishiimenyag and nisayenyag) and transfem butches are my other gender parallel cousins (indawemaawag)

Then other transfems are my other gender cross cousins (niinimoshenyag) and other transmascs are my same gender cross cousins (niitaawisag)

Wow this post turned out way more complicated than I imagined when I started writing it lol

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

Charlie Jane Anders' "Lessons in Magic and Disaster."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/19/revenge-magic/

Charlie Jane Anders' Lessons in Magic and Disaster drops today: it's a novel about queer academia, the wonder of thinking very hard about very old books, and the terror and joy of ambiguous magic. It's my kind of novel!

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250867322/lessonsinmagicanddisaster/

There's a kind of magic I love to read about – the kind where it's not entirely clear whether the person purporting to do magic is acting entirely on instinct, and neither they nor we can be entirely sure whether anything magical has actually happened. This ambiguity just tickles something in me, the part of my brain that tries to bear down on traffic lights to make them turn green, or on board-game dice to get a good roll. It's the mode of Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory and Kelly Link's Book of Love. It's a mode that Anders does superbly, and has done since her 2016 debut novel, All the Birds in the Sky:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/26/charlie-jane-anderss-all-the-birds-in-the-sky-smartass-soulful-novel/

That's the kind of magic at the heart of Magic and Disaster, which tells the story of Jamie, a doctoral candidate at a New England liberal arts college who is trying to hold it all together while she finishes her dissertation. For Jamie, holding it together is a tall order. Her relationship is on the rocks, her advisor is breathing down her neck, a smartass alt-right kid in her class keeps trolling her lectures, and to top it all off, her mother Sarina has withdrawn from society and is self-evidently preparing to lie down and die, out of grief and penance for the death of her wife, who died of cancer that everyone – her doctors and Sarina – downplayed until it was too late.

That would be an impossible lift, except for Jamie's gift for maybe-magic – magic that might or might not be real. Certain places ("liminal spaces") call to Jamie. These are abandoned, dirty, despoiled places, ruins and dumps and littered campsites. When Jamie finds one of these places, she can improvise a ritual, using the things in her pockets and school bag as talismans that might – or might not – conjure small bumps of luck and fortune into Jamie's path.

Jamie's never told anyone about the magic, but when she and Sarina have an especially bitter confrontation, it slips out. In desperation, Jamie gives her mother – a campaigning lawyer who has withdrawn from life and become a hermit – a demonstration of magic. Her mother approaches the demonstration with a lawyer's don't-bullshit-me skepticism, but something in her responds to the magic, and when Jamie leaves her, Sarina tries to bring back her dead wife, a forbidden conjuring that has disastrous consequences.

Jamie had hoped to give her mother something to live for, but catastrophic magical experimentation wasn't what she had in mind. Soon, Jamie is dragged into Sarina's life, to the detriment of her relationship with Ro, a fellow academic who is rightfully suspicious of Sarina and the effect she has on Jamie. When Ro finds out about the magic, the relationship breaks, and now Jamie has to face her problems alone.

Those problems keep mounting. Jamie is working on a dissertation about a 300 year old "ladies' novel" that promises to reveal some profound truth about the life of its author and her challenge to the role that she finds herself confined to as a woman, but it's slow going, and Jamie's advisor is at pains to remind her that there are dramatic changes in the offing to the university, and that Jamie had best get that thesis in soon. Meanwhile, the Men's Rights Activist bro in Jamie's class keeps upping the ante, mixing disruptive "just asking questions" behavior with thinly veiled transphobic digs (Jamie is trans, a fact that is woven around her relationship to her mother and to magic).

Anders tosses a lot of differently shaped objects into the air, and then juggles them, interspersing the main action with excerpts from imaginary 18th century novels (which themselves contain imaginary parables) that serve as both a prestige and a framing device. There's a lot of queer joy in here, a hell of a lot of media theory, and some very chewy ruminations on the far-right mediasphere. There's romance and heartbreak, danger and sacrifice, and most of all, there's that ambiguous magic, which gets realer and scarier as the action goes on.

This is a wonderful magic trick of a novel from a versatile author whose work includes YA space opera, hard sf adventure stories, and a wealth of brilliant short stories. It's a remarkably easy novel to read, given how much very difficult stuff Anders is doing in the writing, and it lingers long after you finish the last page.

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

"The town? Burn the church."

reall quick painting sketch i dont have energy to finish😩

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

We're submitting things we've made?!

I have this giant millipede plush I crocheted. His name is tootimus fruitimus

He took forever...

WOWIEEEE!!! this guy is BEAUTIFUL!! your yarn choice is so perfect, this looks amazing to cuddle with omg

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!

[akaanir-of-starfleet]

My lord I need you to make up your mind, where the fuck are we going