othernaut

[othernaut]

FffffffffffffffFFFFUCKING STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.

Half the book is great. Half the book is a genuinely engaging piece of outsider fiction with an interesting central premise (human foundling raised by aliens returns to Earth with learned psychic powers and a different group of taboos, both of which are normal in his adopted society). It works to humanize the inhuman and examine calcified social mores, things which I find good and laudable anywhere, especially in fiction.

Then, at the halfway point, the book is struck by Penis Lightning and flung right the fuck off the rails.

The second half of the book involves the protagonist establishing an objectively true nudist psychic alien sex religion, one that somehow does absolutely no work examining the calcified social mores of the time it was written and, instead, lionizes the author-insert character as a kind of reluctant harem isekai Jesus. All the nuance it spent half the book carefully constructing is eradicated with the literary equivalent of an unsolicited dick pic.

I hate this goddamn book so much that disposing of it has become a problem. I don't want to donate it anywhere or even throw it out, as that risks some innocent bystander accidentally reading it. I can't destroy it, because I have a moral distaste for book destruction out of preference, even if that book is a cultural hemorrhoid. I settled for writing a dire warning on the inside cover, surrounded by frowny faces, so that if this thing ever escapes containment, its unsuspecting discoverer stands a chance of avoiding psychic damage.

It also pioneered the word "grok", which the ever-churning progress of history has recontextualized into a blighted thing.

Heinlein, I wish you only the toothiest of blowjobs in hell.

Enough about favorite books. What’s a book you read and absolutely hated? The book you’ve got a bone to pick with.

[othernaut]

Channel 1, surface: We're going to the park.

Channel 2, temporospatial: Park, the place, will occur in the future. The future is decreasing in size until it is the now. Time to park diminishes depending on speed at which we approach the park, adjustable by preference.

Channel 3, which is sometimes Channel 2 or even Channel 1 depending on loudness, social: What separates "I" and "we"? How can I assume to be we? Does the other half of we want to go to the park? Is there another place they want to go that, having not perceived and previewed, I have failed failed failed FAILED FAILED to anticipate? Does the weness of the Iness require awareness of this unspoken preference, or am I being weird? Will I be weird if I just want to go to the park because it is nice and I want to see green things?

Channel 4, emotive: leef.

Channel 5, WTF/horrible narrative curse: Maintain continuity with the historical imperative of all "people' who wanted to go the "park". You, who are woman: dress in hoop-skirts, waterproof. Swim with bread-hungry ducks. The story builds, you promenade along the fresh-cut boardwalk in your demure brown skirt and puffy sleeves while simultaneously embodying a hungover millennial, you saw the millennium, and what does that have to do with the park? Does the willow care? Does the human warmth at your elbow? Will they be proud of you? What narrative is building here, is already built? My god, my god, what is its meter?

Channel 6, perceptive/sensory: so hot, halep.

Okay so some people can’t see objects in their imagination and some people don’t think in words and some people hear their thoughts like a voice and others don’t. I get that

But how many distinct channels do most folks have playing at once? cause my normal range is 2-4 and I though that was just what thinking was LIKE but CBD brings that down to just 1

[othernaut]

This moment of unwanted depression brought to you by trying to karaoke-practice Steambreather by Mastodon and choking up at the "I'm afraid of myself" part for the actual rest of the song.

I don't know what element of trauma makes the self an object of fear, but it's probably the worst one. To fully succumb is to be fully ridiculous; the exact thing that makes all others laudable. I love you for who you are, but what the fuck am I? Some dipshit, probably.

[othernaut]

I don't know what element of trauma makes the self an object of fear, but it's probably the worst one. To fully succumb is to be fully ridiculous; the exact thing that makes all others laudable. I love you for who you are, but what the fuck am I? Some dipshit, probably.

[othernaut]

Legend has it the finest clothes can be found there.

the lost city of The soup store

[othernaut]

The worst thing I ever did at a D&D table was when our DM ran out of place name ideas and told us the name of the port town we needed to go to was "Bar Harbor".

So I tricked him into roleplaying the slightly-too-helpful town guard into giving us directions to- Well you see, the party has been out in the wilderness for like a MONTH, we're all a mess, the dwarf's beard is out of control, so can you tell us- Where can we find the Bar Harbor Barber?

But we were not done. We each took turns, like a pack of velociraptors.

We also had Dryad in the party and a few of her branches got broken in a fight and now her whole canopy is unbalanced and it looks awful, but she really needs to see a specialist, is there a Bar Harbor Arbor Barber?

The Paladin also wanted to look in on a small church he'd heard of, that the city had a patron saint, who was boiled alive in a cauldron of ale, so where is the temple of the Bar Harbor Larger Martyr?

It was around this point that Chris started to tire of this nonsense.

The bard, naturally, wanted to go carousing, and he'd heard this town had some of the most attentive and welcoming Ladies of the Night on the continent, known by thier brightly colored stocking bands, so had he seen any of the Bar harbor Ardor Parlor Farber Garters?

Chris immediately escalated to threats of a Total Party Kill.

Unfortunately, I'd had time to prepare and-

"What do you want?"

"I just wanted to know if you'd seen my cousin."

"...Your cousin?"

"Yeah, I know it's a long shot, but he's got a pretty distinctive appearence and you might have seen him around town."

"Oh No-"

"Okay so he's Welsh and the whole family used to be in the wagon-making business but he got into clothes manufacture until there was an accident with a lamp black dye and now he's permanently stained a sooty color and that really turns heads, so now he's got a job drawing in crowds for the city funded swap meet- no, not the Drow that also works there, I mean like the inside of a fireplace- anyway, he got tired of people mixing the two of them up so he started wearing this fancy armor with a magical +1 charisma bonus-"

"Gallus I swear to God I *WILL* Summon the Tarraqsue-"

"-So have you seen my cousin, Arthur Carter, former Sartor but now he's the Darker Harker for the Charter Barter of Bar Harbor, the one with the Charmer Armor?"

Amazingly, we survived the Tarrasque.

[othernaut]

If given editorial control over the world, this is what would happen when Marineland finally breathes its last, hateful breath.

I don't know why the phrase "solarpunk amusement park" roughly rammed itself sideways into my head at speed, but now it's going to be all I think about all day.

[othernaut]

Solar panel-covered sun-shades over heat-blasted rollercoaster queues. Park-spanning people-movers made of the exact machinery and design as street-level transit. Food and bamboo forests shading the pathways. Hydroelectric lazy river. Train station's just outside the gates, no one has to drive there or back. The ice cream's provided by the farm next door, you can go there on the way home and get more, if you like it. Whole thing's a co-op. Whole thing's fuckin' accessible. In defiance of Disney, you can be buried there if you like; your grave will be a pear tree and you'll be forever surrounded by laughter and joyful cries.

You see it, don't you? On that little bridge between rollercoasters, where all the kids stop and stare at the koi down in the river below. How every turn around the track, there's that one kid standing by the operator's booth, asking a million questions. How at the end of the day you feel tired and cheap, carrying a liter-full plastic slushie cup you didn't want and will never use. I know we can do it better, and I know we can make it fun. Because that's the whole damn thing, isn't it? The dream is achievable, we can do it now, it's so close - but if it were craveable? If it wasn't something we had to do, but something we get to do?

It could look like a heart-fluttering coaster-tangle. It could look like a pirate dive show every half-hour. It could look like mascots, souvenirs, waterslides, carousels, carnival games, cheap sugar - and you could leave feeling tired and hopeful, like it's all something you want to do again tomorrow.

I don't know why the phrase "solarpunk amusement park" roughly rammed itself sideways into my head at speed, but now it's going to be all I think about all day.

[othernaut]

I don't know why the phrase "solarpunk amusement park" roughly rammed itself sideways into my head at speed, but now it's going to be all I think about all day.

[othernaut]

... My Italian ass never once considered it weird to have cookies for breakfast. You dip them in some black coffee, that's a meal. You're looking for a less sweet cookie, probably flavoured with vanilla or anise; this is biscotti's favourite use. It's functionally no different than white bread with butter on it? Only you can't dip that into black coffee, and it entirely misses the essential "this makes me happy and want to keep living" part of the meal.

adulthood is just a constant struggle of, “man, i want cookies for breakfast, but I also recognize this is a bad nutritional decision.  On the other hand, the only one who can stop me is me.  i know that fucker’s weaknesses.  i could totally take me in a fight.”

[othernaut]

They send the children out in early springtime, as a ritual. People use it as an excuse to travel, to see the wet world blooming early at the end of an isolated winter. Those who have the seeds share them with those who had no choice but to eat them. Fat little bodies running through the mud, screaming and scattering seeds in handfuls. Travelers spreading a few sprays when they stop for lunch.

In the summer, they send crews out to dig under the tallest sunflowers. Once the stalks are cleared and the roots pulled up, they dig. They've found tanks this way, trucks buried sideways. Twice, a buried building, oxidized copper roof green and waiting under a dozen or more meters of packed brown soil. Once, a knot of tangled bicycles, all chained together. More times than comfortable to think about, they've found bombs, or rusted metal barrels seeping colour into gurgling groundwater.

Those tall flowers, they're buried like people are, under ash and earth. They've done their work, they've earned their rest. They've tried to keep the children from naming them, unsuccessfully. Little wooden graves with shaky honorifics in neon paint.

Anything that grows on those graves, they're let be. You'd do the same for anyone's children.

"Hm, I've already established that this nation in my story has a lot of sunflowers as a background detail, I should take five minutes real quick to see what those can be used for."

🎶You can eat the stalks! You can eat the leaves! You can eat the petals! You can eat the seeds! You can eat the tubers! Turn 'em into booze! Go and plant some sunflowers! If you don't you lose! 🎶

[othernaut]

In my case, feathered wings: Good, nice, enjoyable. Orderly rows of feathers, a beautiful spray of expressive, overlapping points. The pinion feathers like open hands eagerly grasping the sky. The little ruff of down where the wing connects with the body. The body. The body...

Every other part of the bird: Some sort of lumpy orb with a triangle attached. Where do the feet go, they're always just sticking out of there. Fuck I forgot the tail again. Fuck.

feathered wings are one of the most frustrating things to draw, this is my albatross to bear

[othernaut]

Some real prairie horizontality going on in the background here. Your butt must have been pounded flat!

for all the buckaroos celebrating CANADA DAY today

[othernaut]

A huge amount of learning to write is just wandering around, looking at things.

You learn to collect them, the spot descriptions of those little moments. The mottled sun speckling the gravel path; the uniform cornflower blue of a 5PM sky with a bit of a thunderstorm in it. The yellowing plastic of a going-out-of-business sign in a storefront two years closed. The milkfat, the cheap sugar in a double-double after you haven't eaten all day. All those calm old graves on all that cool green grass. All of it.

It sits in your head until it finds a place to spend itself. Those four minutes miserably endured in the speed-broil of the sun, waiting for the bus - the cadence and candor of that guy two bodylengths away talking on his cell about his cousin's new dog, that's going to be the backbone of how a character speaks. When you're walking through the grocery store, and you look up, and you note the distant sheet-metal regularity of the faraway ceiling, you're going to feel something unique to you - that will be the gravitic center around which a universe of meaning will rotate.

It's never what you think it is. It's not going to be a grand revelation earned through hours of dutiful labour. It's going to be a dog's breakfast of crude descriptors boiled in a stock of half-baked fanfiction pattern recognition. It's going to be a bathroom poem you like so much that the meter follows you forever. It's going to be all your friends (and that one friendly cashier, and the neighborhood feral cat, and that one kid in that one local newspaper sports picture with such a reckless gap-toothed smile) living in a world that can't hurt them. When you think of the difference between the love you see in Tinder ads and the love you see in the world, when you sit in the passport office trying to put a shape to the dread that consumes you - there it is. There it is.

And there's just no hope for it but to wander around, looking at things. That's the work and it takes decades.

I know you have them in you.

Anxiety: You're almost 30 and haven't published a single book. You wasted your chance to become a successful author!

Me: Stan Lee created Spider-Man at age 40. George R. R. Martin wrote A Game of Thrones at age 48.

Anxiety: Oh fuck nvm you do you, king.

[othernaut]

While we're at it:

"ffffffffffff" = barely contained rage.

"fffffffFFFFUUUUUUUUUU" = barely contained rage, old millennial version.

"f u" = direct insult.

"f" = condolences, cheekily.

"fflkfldkaslklkasjgv" = so angry i would cast off my humanity for the chance to bite someone in the face.

"fuck." = I have just realized the depth of my error, and I feel both anger and shame.

"ouhhhh" is a different emotion from "ough" which is a different emotion from "augh" which is a different emotion from "wough". I could go on. and these all convey different feelings depending on spelling variation and how many "h"s you add at the end too

[othernaut]

I will also take inexplicable speculative fiction scenarios and arm-waving ritual gibberish.

The anon button is not for hate. The anon button is for horny and embarrassed about it.

[othernaut]

You stop working for five seconds, and you stare into the middle distance, and you close your laptop, and you get up, and start walking, and keep walking, and keep walking, and the sky goes pink-blue-grey, and the traffic gets bad and loosens up again, and you keep walking, and you go until you find a wide enough patch of trees that the dark between the trunks is primordial and alive, and you do not break your stride, and you are under the leaves, and the leaves are above you and around you, and the bugs are biting you, and your sweat has a different flavor to it, and you didn't bring food or water but there's a few Werther's in your pocket from Christmas and that'll do for now, and you walk until all the sounds are unfamiliar, and you stand in the midst of that all-listening and uncomprehending shadow until your breath comes back to you, and there, right there, you can speak aloud all the little vulnerabilities for whom the barest outside perception would be akin to crucifixion.

Then you can get some A&W. It counts as exercise.

The hitting the fun part of summer where I end up driving way out somewhere in the middle of the night to sit in an unlit parking lot with a bag of junk food and explain all the weird grief I've accumulated to the shadow in the passenger seat I picked up somewhere along the way because nobody else will understand early this year.