modernwizard

[modernwizard]

A DORKLET wrote this. :D

[modernwizard]

A DORKLET!

Took my tiny child with me to the Halloween store. Walked in and immediately realized it would be a terrible mistake.

They had those jumpscare machine things everywhere, lots of spooky noise machines, scary looking animatronic things, crazy decorations, just the whole 9 yards and then some. I immediately went to turn around and leave when I heard a noise coming from my arms.

My one year old child who gets scared if we cough…. was laughing.

She makes this precious “eee!” sound and starts vibrating when she sees something she really likes, usually an animal or a balloon, and she points right at the big zombie thing by the door and does that. I carry her in past a huge 10 ft tall Pennywise inflatable, and she smacks me to tell me to stop so she can look. She ponders him for a moment, and his glowing light-up eyes, then points at his hand and shouts “BEEM!” Which is her word for “balloon.” She made us stand there under Pennywise for at least 3 minutes, which is a really long time for a one-year-old.

Then, she begs to get down, so I let her loose and she just books it all over the store. Finds the creepy demonic looking babies and shouts “BABY!” then gets this confused look on her face and tries to wipe the “dirt” off their faces. Decides it’s not worth it, goes and picks up a severed hand decoration, hands it to me and says “hand.” Yes, my dear, it is a hand. And yes, that severed foot has “toes,” you’re very right.

Finds the wigs, runs down the aisle shouting “hair! hair!” and grabbing her own sparse little headfuzz so hard I think she’s going to rip it all out. Then she found the speaker in the wall that was blaring Monster Mash and she demanded I pick her up so we could “DANSSSE”. But she got distracted by the big spider decorations, which she christened as dogs by running toward them and barking.

She ran up and down the aisles of costumes touching the fabric and making her little “tss tss tss” giggle that she does when she’s having Much Too Good a Time. Every so often she’d stop, look back to make sure I was there, and point at something and vibrate with her aggressive “EEEE!”

A man turned a corner wearing one of the creepy latex masks. He immediately started apologizing to me, saying “I’m so sorry, I’m looking for my friend, I don’t want to scare her.” Meanwhile my child is standing there looking up at him with the most confused look on her face. Not scared, just confused, like he is so dumb and she can’t figure out why he would want to make that stupid face for so long. But he rounds another corner all hunched over, she flaps her arms and sighs, and takes off to go scream at the creepy lawn decorations.

When it was time to go, nothing could convince her to come to me willingly, so I had to promise her one last look at the balloon man while I picked her up against her will. Pennywise placated her, and we left the store with a smile on her chubby little cheeks. She demanded we wait and watch the big inflatable-flailing-arm-tube-man out front, the one that was bright orange and had a jack-o-lantern face, and she bounced and wiggled and danced in my arms despite its fan being louder than the loud motorcycles that scare her on our walks. She waved bye-bye to it as we left for the car.

Basically, that was the cutest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life, and it’s so crazy how so many things are culturally taught and kids are just… immune to that. All she saw was bright colors and things she recognized and could name, in a place she could explore and touch. She has no concept of clowns being scary or zombies being A Thing or what constitutes “creepy” and “spooky” and “gross.” To her, a severed arm with gore hanging out the end doesn’t represent pain or violence, it’s just “arm,” and it’s got some weird stuff on the end that’s funny colors. They’re just things, there’s no context for it.

The world is weird and beautiful and it’s so cool to see it through the eyes of someone who is so New to this planet and hasn’t been influenced by society and culture yet.

[modernwizard]

There are definitely some Saxons in the business of revenge, and they're just as capitalist and morally compromised as this guy. They're probably mostly Landlords and Lawyers.

[modernwizard]

The Magister entertained the thought of getting an Odyssey solely so he could put this bumper sticker on it, but the hearse still functions perfectly [despite pushing seventy at this point], so he decided not to.

[modernwizard]

A DORKLET! Probs Little Theo, who's a hiker and camper and budding field biologist, but it could also be Little Allison, Silencitx, Ethancitx, or Little Night.

HEEELPPP a six year old just came into the nature center and she had SO many questions. it's pouring rain and nobody else is here but her family so non-stop for an hour she had my full attention. by the end of it i had half my field guides open to various insects and mammals and birds and she just kept going.

she became extremely fixated on bigfoot and asked about the ways people try to prove its existence until I was explaining DNA to her, and she asked such thoughtful questions! she said, "what if someone found a skull they thought might be bigfoot, and there was hair left over. could we use DNA from hair to prove it's bigfoot?" but before i could answer, she said, "but if you don't have a living bigfoot that you KNOW is bigfoot, to take hair from, how could you know this hair from this dead bigfoot is really bigfoot hair?" !!!! what an awesome question!!

so this 6 year old and i started discussing control groups in scientific studies and she was so engaged!!

then the bigfoot talk led to discussions of extinction which led to dinosaurs, and she said, "what I don't understand is why people say dinosaurs are extinct, but they also say that dinosaurs became birds. how could they all be extinct if they became something else?"

she asked questions that really challenged me in that figuring out how to answer them on the fly in a way that's digestible wasn't totally straightforward.

a few minutes ago, the adult with her said it was time to go and get ice cream and she said, "can't you see I have 1,000 more questions to ask? i have to just bloooowwww them all out now so you don't have to answer them later."

I saw my younger self in her so much LOL. They said they're coming back tomorrow and I said, "I won't be here, but my colleague knows even more than I do!" And she said, "Well, I hope so. He's gonna need to."

[modernwizard]

Silence!!

...Although she would copyedit this post:

"This fic is literally just porn. Why do you care about the quality of the editing?"

Unfortunately, both my brain and my dick had strong opinions about verb tenses.

"This fic is literally just porn, why do you care about the quality of the editing" unfortunately, both my brain and my dick have strong opinions about verb tenses.

[modernwizard]

A perfect example of kid logic and innate kid understanding of language! Also a perfect example of a dorklet.

Six year old, bouncing up and down with glee as desserts are unpacked: "I'm so appointed!"

Took me a moment to realize she had logically assumed "appointed" must be the opposite of "disappointed" and used it as a synonym for "excited."

[modernwizard]

The kind of thing the Elder Witches would do when they were dorklets, assuming giants existed. [They do not in the Hardshipverse.]

05.10 - “The wizards had been summoned to wake the sleeping giant”

[modernwizard]

Parents of dorklets' house rules.

[modernwizard]

DORKLETS! Little Night and Little Day, probs, given that one of the parents just sews people up. [That would be the Stylist, who is also a surgeon.]

i dont know why anyone else misses analog board games, but to me, it's because physical parts let me cheat. there's no moving pieces around when someone isnt looking in a chess app, no sneaking bonus pieces out of the graveyard in checkers, no double drawing cards in go fish.

i spent years developing those skills as a Professional Little Brother. what am i supposed to do now, go back to college? learn how to play games the right way? i mean, who gives a shit? the fun part was never the game, it was the Getting Away With It. or, you know, for the rest of my family, Catching The Bastard. now that was entertainment.

[modernwizard]

The Magister upon being interrupted incessantly by dorklets.

[modernwizard]

What do you get when you cross my inordinate admiration for Sacha Dhawan and MerMay?

Pictures of Sacha Dhawan as the Spymaster playing Rasputin as a merperson, of course!

Today we have "The Girl with the Pearl...Everything," in which the mer-Master reflects that the earth probably moved just now, and now there are pearls everywhere!!

@natalunasans @sclfmastery @bellejanewednesday

[modernwizard]

What do you get when you cross my inordinate admiration for Sacha Dhawan and MerMay?

Pictures of Sacha Dhawan as the Spymaster playing Rasputin as a merperson, of course!

Today we have "Things in My Beard," in which the mer-Master experiences a side effect of extensive fake facial hair.

And a close-up of his INDIGNANT expression. How dare things hang out in his beard when he's trying to preen?!

@natalunasans @sclfmastery @bellejanewednesday

[modernwizard]

The Magister's reaction, probs.

Need you to know that I heard about the pope news in the most normal and natural of places: the person tabling the Medieval Academy of America table at the International Congress on Medieval Studies declaring "HABEMUS PAPAM AMARICANAM?????" in bafflement.

[modernwizard]

What do you get when you cross my inordinate admiration for Sacha Dhawan and MerMay?

Pictures of Sacha Dhawan as the Spymaster playing Rasputin as a merperson, of course!

This series started off with regular ol' Spymaster Rasputin pinups....

Looking fierce! [Yes, he's supposed to look kind of silly....]

Grinning...

Inviting you to warm him up [note ushanka and silly socks]...

And welcoming you into the water with some completely innocent rusalki [Slavic folkloric water creatures, sometimes the spirits of drowned people, who tend to drag people to watery doom]... "Come on in! The water's fine!"

From there I started thinking that mer-Rasputin would be hilarious, especially the association of merpeople with feminine sexiness combined with the Spymaster's gender-bending.

The first effort in this occasional series is called "Serving Pearl," with a suggestively located pearl and a shit-eating grin on Rasputin's face.

Tagging my fellow Spymaster fans, particularly @natalunasans andf @sclfmastery because I know they'd appreciate this. @bellejanewednesday

All hail the glories of mer-Rasputin!

[modernwizard]

The Magister and Ethan don't argue with Silence. They just point out different aspects of her statements that need refinement.

Not to sound like a T-Shirt slogan but sometimes I am genuinely “not arguing with you, just explaining that you’re wrong” because the first implies equally valuable perspectives and the second acknowledges either a true objective reality, or at least a universally subjective one, wherein data exists and can be reliably assessed

[modernwizard]

Silence and the Magister have mutual ecstasies over this.

common origins of suffering, euphoria, and ferret

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