deathmino-blog

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wow cat gott last names

A cat owner invited their neighbor over for dinner and introduced their four cats. “That’s Alogue, Aract, Erpillar, and Astrophe,” they announced. The neighbor was surprised and asked, Where on Earth did you get those names?

Oh, those are their last names, the owner said. Their first names are Cat.

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comedy gold

🤣

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i like this post alot good writing

While we like to joke about Izzy being in the wrong genre, I would argue that there are in fact at least five distinct genre universes in the world of Our Flag Means Death, and all of them have different rules.

Stede Bonnet, and his crew when they’re around him, live in a Muppet movie. I didn’t come up with this analogy but it’s so accurate. Insane physical comedy and comedy-action where no one really gets hurt. Mild peril but you know everything is gonna work out. Terrible puns and sight gags, but room for sweet, genuine emotional moments too. The rules of time, space, probability and logic will bend for a good joke.

Izzy Hands is in a grimdark action/drama where if someone gets stabbed in the gut they will behave normally and fucking die. (Probably slowly and painfully, of sepsis.) Crucially I think Izzy also lives in a genre where you can only be subtextually queer, and violence (done for or with or to each other) is the only acceptable form of intimacy between men. This is why being forcibly dragged into Stede’s world, where everyone is busy having silly low-stakes misadventures and being gay and emotionally available all over the main text–and seeing his Subtextual Boyfriend go into this world and love it–sends him round the twist.

The British, Spanish and other imperialist militaries are in a Master and Commander-style naval adventure where they’re the heroes. This is why they all take it completely seriously when Stede (unintentionally) kills Badminton and takes hostages, even though we can see that he bumbled his way into it ass-backwards. This is also why Stede is so shocked to get actually for real stabbed aboard the Spanish ship. (“Did you mean to do that?”) He didn’t realize until that moment that he’d stepped into a different genre. The stabbing is one of the first Surprise Genre Switch moments we get and in retrospect it’s very important for setting up that in this world, the threat of getting hurt or killed is very real–which we need to understand to know that there are real stakes much later, when Stede almost gets executed by the British.

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i hate when i does that :(

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i love this man child

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comedy gold

“Terrance the Terran from Terra” alternatively known as Earthboy the Earthling from Earth

So we’ve seen the joke in sci-fi where a translator doesn’t stop so the Sahara Desert becomes Desert Desert.

But I also think we’re missing a vital piece of comedy gold in terms of character naming. Specifically the name Terrance.

Why Terrance you might be wondering to yourself? Where’s the comedy in that? It sounds like a pretty standard human name?

And it is. But here’s where the funny part comes in. 

In a lot of ‘Humans are Space Orcs’ Earth gets renamed or mistranslated into Terra, and so humans are usually called Terrans. Are you seeing where I’m going with this yet?

If you write sci-fi of this particular genre, please consider having a character named, Terrance the Terran from Terra. And then having every other character’s translators short circiut. Because surely no mother actually named their child Earthboy the Earthling from Earth.

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that damn autocorrect

googledocs you are getting awfully uppity for something that can’t differentiate between “its” and “it’s” correctly

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well hoped he would punch just one but o well

Humans are weird: Facing Fear

Alien: *Appears as horrific manifestation*

Alien: Are you afraid?

Alien: Am I not the culmination of your nightmares made real?

Human: I would be lying if I said I wasn’t.

Alien: Will you run?

Alien: Will you flee and scatter to the four winds?

Human: My feet are telling me too but I doubt I would make it far.

Human: You would catch me in no time at all, so I will stand here.

Alien: So you surrender to your fate?

Human: I do not.

Alien: You do not?

Human: No.

Alien: No?

Alien: Why?

Human: If I were to die now how else am I to experience this emotion?

Alien: You wish to know fear?

Alien: How perplexing.

Alien: Those who I have encountered seek to avoid such sensations.

Alien: Do you enjoy being afraid?

Human: I do not.

Human: I often try to avoid being put in these types of situations.

Alien: And yet you are here.

Human: Avoiding something does not guarantee you will never encounter it, only that it will take a bit longer.

Alien: Now that we have arrived at this moment, why then do you wish to revel in what you have fled from for so long?

Human: It has been so long since I have been afraid I have forgotten what it means.

Human: I had forgotten the sound of my heartbeat ringing in my ears.

Human: I had forgotten the feel of my shaking hands as adrenaline courses through my body.

Human: I had forgotten the sensation of sweat running down my cheek.

Alien: You make it sound as if you need to feel fear to know what it means to be alive.

Human: *Chuckles* I guess you can say that.

Alien: Most perplexing indeed.

Human: My people, humans, are creatures of emotion.

Human: We need to feel things to not only experience the universe but to also be part of it.

Human: Simply existing without feeling leaves us only a shadow of our former self.

Alien: Why then do you not just experience the positive emotions?

Alien: What use are negative sensations?

Human: Without negative feelings how then can you define what good ones are?

Alien: And what if I were to end you here and now?

Human: Then death shall be my final sensation and my journey will have been complete.

Alien: You have deprived me of my joy in causing fear, so now we shall part ways.

Human: As you wish.

Human: Until we meet again.

Alien: Don’t count on it……

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so human have stripes cool

Stripes

Tom was sent to greet a new temporary crew member. Riggs provided him with a brief overview of the alien. They were a Chendro, some sort of insect-like species from a few systems away.

Tom greeted the alien in the same, boring, but safe way,

“Greetings. Welcome aboard the Starship Navis. My name is Tom, I am the human navigator sent to meet you and acquaint you with the ship before we leave.”

The alien let out a series of clicks which was translated moments later.

“Thank you, human Tom. I am quite pleased to be working with you for these next few cycles.” The alien followed with an intricate bow that Tom had no way of reciprocating. He settled for a respectful nod of the head.

The two wandered around the Navis, with Tom occasionally breaking the silence to point out a few key landmarks or an odd, obscure rule.

Eventually, Tom felt the Chendro’s gaze on him. In fact, he realised, he had felt it for quite a while now. He glanced over to see they’re mantis-like eyes locked on him.

“Hey man, I don’t want to sound rude or anything but staring is kinda considered rude to us,” Tom pointed out.

“Oh!” The alien quickly averted their gaze. “My apologies, I was simply admiring your wonderful patterning.”

“My… what?”

“Your stripes,” The Chendro clarified. “I think they’re quite stunning.”

Tom looked away, surprisingly flustered by the alien’s openness. 

“Umm…Thanks…” He didn’t have the heart to ask the alien what they were talking about. Perhaps it was a human thing he wasn’t aware of. Having secret stripes wouldn’t be the weirdest thing he’d learnt about his species.

The rest of the tour went well after that. Tom noticed that the Chendro kept it’s eyes away from him; usually straight in front if them. He appreciated the alien’s willingness to adapt to what was probably to them, a weird social convention.

Later, once the tour was done and Tom was settled in his quarters he asked Constance the question that had been burning in his mind for a good portion of the cycle.

“Hey, Constance?”

“Yes Tom?”

“Do humans have stripes?”

“Humans do have what is called Blaschko’s lines. They are only visible to humans in rare cases but are seen to those with vision in the ultraviolet range. Is that what you’d be referencing?”

“Huh. I guess…” Tom was surprised by the information. Why the hell had he never heard of humans having stripes? He felt like he would’ve picked up on that in biology. But yet again he could have been asleep for that particular lesson.

“Constance, are Chendro able to see UV?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, ok. That answers a lot actually. Thanks for the help.”

“It was my pleasure, Tom.”

Tom continued to sit there for a while contemplating this new information. He even found a few pictures of visible stripes. He could relate to the Chendro then. They were pretty cool. And to think that every human had patterns like that.

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100 likes!

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this is just to cute

See strange new worlds and pet the carnivores.

Imagine the poor, alien zoologists. They have a human on staff to pick stuff up and generally do human related things. That little encampment has made it very very safe for certain species because the automated defences will scare off many of the large predators.

The problem is, they haven’t considered the fact that they have a very large predator inside the camp, wandering around carrying stuff and doing general human related tasks. And one day they find the human petting one of the cubs of one of the more successful local predators.

Why? Because mommy pred has been watching the camp and spotted the human looking after all the crunchy little aliens, put 2 and 2 together and identified the human as Friend Shaped, and dropped off her cub for free babysitting.

And the human is just thrilled by this, because they’re weighing, tagging and grabbing all sorts of data on an infant Szilan Deathstalker (she’s been nicknamed Princess. She likes her blanket box and stalking the head of BioAssay).

And now the camp is an important part of the health and wellbeing of the local predator population who turn up and yowl until the human takes their cubs and puts them in a box for a nap.

(Based on the story of the Cheetah female who dumped her cubs with a park ranger for safety.)

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what tigers look green for deer

Sixth Fucking Sense Apparently

So humans have a funky little sixth sense for when someone/thing is looking at us and honestly wtf.

So an alien spy is trying to get human info getting progressively more concerned when the human they're tailing keeps looking around and acting like they know the alien is there. Maybe it's an alien species renowned for stealth and no other sentient in the galaxy had ever been able to spot them so at this point they're double checking themselves and going insane.

At this point the human's figured shit out and so they lead the alien into a trap much to Sneaky McSneakfuck's dismay and confusion.

So eventually humans hold a press conference about the whole stalker and the galactic federation or whatever it would be called is like:

GF: How in the dick shitting fuck did you know they were there??

Human: felt them watching me.

Gf: felt them fucking What.

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this is just gold

The Little Things

“It’s the unexpected stuff that gets me,” I said, swirling my drink. “Like, I’ll expect alien food on the alien spaceship, but the first time I heard offworld music, I thought the engine was about to fail.”

“Oh, I know, right?” agreed the other human, waving her own drink around. She hadn’t spilled it on the spaceport floor yet, but her ship had heavier gravity than this, and she was still adjusting. “And have you smelled what passes for perfume among the Mesmers? It’s like someone cut an onion and rubbed it in hot peppers.”

“Wow, I haven’t come across that yet,” I said with a glance back toward the spacedocks. “We’ve got two Mesmers onboard. Maybe they haven’t felt like getting fancy.” I tried to picture either of my exoskeletoned crewmates preparing for a high-class event, and my brain shorted out. Neither of them seemed the type. Zhee would stand by the punchbowl and complain about everything, while Trrili would hide behind curtains and jump out to startle people. Probably.

“It might be a courtship perfume,” the other human was saying. “Either that or it’s really expensive. I swear, if our navigator wore that on a regular basis, I’d have to invest in one of those high-quality personal air filters. It was bad.”

“Enough to make you miss the people who overdid the perfume back home?” I asked.

She set her drink down and leaned forward. “Enough to make me miss the body odor back home. And I don’t say that lightly!”

“I’ll bet!” I said with a toast of my own drink. It was cherry soda in a champagne glass. The Frillians running this restaurant were so proud of their Earth foods, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them that was anything other than a perfectly normal combination. And the fried-chicken-on-French-toast was actually good.

“It has been a while since I was home, though,” she said, picking at the remains of her macaroni and peas. “Earlier I saw somebody wearing a scarf like my mom’s, and now I keep thinking of all the things I miss. The tree outside my bedroom window, the cat purring, the sound of rain over an old TV show.”

I had a mild epiphany. “Well,” I said, finishing my drink. “I can’t help with all of that, but if you want to make a quick visit to my ship…” I leaned with a conspiratorial grin and whispered, “I’ve got kittens.”

Her gasp made people at three different tables look at us. “Oh my god, yes! Here, I’ll pay for your food. Where did you get kittens??”

“It’s a long story,” I said as she tapped at the payment interface. “I’ll tell you while they’re busy trying to fight your shoes.”

With a happy squeal that caused more than one wince from the aliens nearby, she swept our dishes into the recycler, then we were off to the spacedocks.

~~~

The ongoing backstory of the main character from this book. More to come!

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i did not know this this is my first day using tumblr

I like going to “new to tumblr“, “new account“, “new here“ tags and help people who have no idea how TF this site works

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books about the early space program will be like ‘and aside from some communication system problems and this strange mystery that didn’t affect anything and never happened again, everything went perfectly fine’ and then proceed to explain how everything did in fact not go perfectly fine but no one died so close enough

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I LOVE THIS

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how can people pressure knitter HOW!?

I don’t know who needs to hear this but it’s okay for writing to be a HOBBY that you do because you enjoy, and that you don’t want to do when you’re not enjoying it. No one’s up in the business of knitters telling them they have to be willing to SUFFER and SWEAT or they’ll NEVER FINISH THAT SWEATER and they can’t expect good things to come to them. I don’t know why our current culture around writing is so intense, but I’m here to support your casual, relaxing writing habit. If people can glue pompoms together or knit a scarf or watch hours of streaming shows with their spare time there’s absolutely no reason writers can’t waste time writing just for pleasure, without any expectation that they’re going to Achieve something Amazing and Important or make a bunch of money or whatever.