pyrrhadves-hole

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I was promised enemies to lesbians and all i got was cosmic grief

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hey you ever just stop and think about how g1deon was (on john's orders, granted) actively hunting and trying to kill a mentally ill teenage girl. and then he politely ate her shitty soup. with all his least favorite vegetables in it. he ate the soup. he spent that whole scene like. quietly picking around the veggies drinking stock rather than refusing or even just leaving the table.

and then he didn't even get mad when she tried to kill him with it. why should he? it was fair play. it was a good trick. if john hadn't been there, it probably would've worked. so he gives her a little good game salute with his cigarette.

i am. rotating him.

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hearing about some interesting new dimensions to the term "girl dad"

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Getting fish with the fam

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The Lovers: represent partnership, balance, and unity.

Acrylic ink on watercolor paper. Painted in June of 2023.

Many of the cavalier/necromancer pairs would work here, but Cam and Pal the most I think.

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some lyctor thoughts

-cytherea said she’d been thinking of infiltrating canaan house for 500 years

-mercy and august said that Dios Apate had been planned down to the ground for 500 years

-doctor sex, who lived 500 years ago, presumably wrote a letter stored in his study to someone attempting become a lyctor

…what did John do 500 years ago??

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I can't stop thinking about Palamedes holding out his hand for Camilla to spit her gum into before dueling Marta like in Challengers

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I think a lot about pre-Resurrection era, and I feel like we don't really talk about how weird John was before anything magical ever happened. Like, maybe he was tuning into the earth before there were any signs, but at bare minimum it would've been Different, and the energy is still so wild.

Man who'd gotten multiple tertiary degrees and taken a secret government job by his 30s, if not before. Was apparently working in such a way that they had funding for the project but weren't going to get paid well themselves until it was over, given the kill fee on the project. Who was living in the facility before the project ever got shut down. Who watched his partners cry in each other's arms like babies but didn't cry with them, only felt frustrated he couldn't do anything about it.

Who didn't worry before they got the news and didn't worry when they were all over the news, who just kept working obsessively even after the funding got cut. Not even frantically, but calmly. Sleeping like a baby and waking up to have six breakthroughs a day. "You're on amphetamines, you are on coke, you're on amphetamines and coke" and laughing at "Yeah, Coke Zero" was after the shutdown notice but before anything magic.

Guy who did object personification so hard he thought of the medical cadavers as friends. "I know it was weird having favourites, but let’s bloody face it, I’d gone weird."

Just... God... Idk.

Early John to me feels like some kind of TBH Creature Cryptid. Borderline feral not in an apeshit way but like a stray cat that wandered in. Honestly, basically Paul's vibes in terms of overwhelming curiosity and innovation and being utterly unphased by so much in the process. Just, "Interesting!" and continuing on. Getting bad news and going "Oh." And continuing on, too.

Honestly, given everything between how the investors had been ready to push the project forward if they'd been willing to compromise safety measures and at the same time how much trouble they were gonna have disposing of the bodies, it sounds like the mixture they were using was perfectly survivable but had severe side effects. Perhaps ones that could likely be recovered from over time after waking by a living person, or recovered Enough that if people consented to it it was deemed worth it for one generation to help ensure more would keep living, but would have done immediate damage burying a corpse freshly loaded up with such effects.

And I think about how the world panicked when word got out about the project, because it made it clear how bad things really were, and how John said as a result he'd never work in the industry again. People writing think pieces about the project. The specific wording choice of John saying he was "irradiated". And I'm like.... was he actually though. Is that part of why he's Like This now. And if they were doing something radioactive, something to try to save the planet longterm, the irony then with the bombs...

I think about the contrast between "I was sleeping like a baby" despite his obsessive focus at the beginning versus "I'd stopped sleeping, and I wasn't eating much" by the end.

I think about how A— and M— and G— presumably left wherever they'd been living to move in with him, how gradually more of them moved in. How so many people outside the inner circle left their homes to just camp out near him. How A— and M— fought constantly even back then but never about the other's relationship with John. How "G— always thought anything I said or did was fine. Not necessarily right, but fine."

And the only thing I can ever imagine is despite everything— despite his lack of much outward emotional expression, the flippancy and vindictiveness, the eccentricity, the constant lowkey dismissal of everyone around him in favor of focusing so intently on his work and goals— John for as long as G— had known him and up through the end times was always such a radiant shining light that people who recognized it couldn't help but be drawn to him. That his sheer passion for life and justice and dedicating his life to improving the world for future generations inspired people so much that whether or not they'd continue to follow him was never in question. That for all of how bad he was at showing the people around him, no one questioned how deeply he loved. He recognized that it was the corpses he'd loved most that stayed incorrupti, and Alecto herself agrees that's exactly why she chose him: "For John so loved the world."

And everything turns out Like This.

I am just gonna be unwell forever I think.

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“I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, into a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly. Their reaction seems to me in direct proportion to the sense of feeling cheated of the advantages which accrue to white people in a white society. There’s an element, it has always seemed to me, of bewilderment and complaint. Now that may sound very harsh, but the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society. It’s a very hermetically sealed world with very unattractive features, including racism.”

— James Baldwin, from a 1984 interview given with Richard Goldstein, in the Village Voice

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The ACLU just called me and helped connect the call to my representative’s office so I could leave a message for my congressman about the godawful budget bill, and it was super nice because I’ve been really wanting to do something about it but making phone calls is really hard for my anxiety and tracking down the right person to call is hard with my ADD. So the nice man on the phone literally stayed on the line, helping when I needed advice (which phone menu option to pick, etc.) but being quiet otherwise. And with his help I got it done and it wasn’t too hard or scary!

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meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee right now

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They should Tell everyone on both love island and survivor that a nuke blew up the Us and that they have to work together to start a new society . And then see which one becomes more warlike / Powerful

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(trying awkwardly to hit) so a lot of blood has been leaving my body lately

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You know how there's that dangling plot thread about the Emperor's lost chambers in Canaan House in Harrow the Ninth? I was browsing Harrow for another, unrelated post and this stopped me dead in my tracks:

So I immediately searched for “broom” in Gideon the Ninth, and

… Well, that says nothing really, though it's kinda funny that Canaan is an inversion of the Mithraeum.

… What about Nona?

So I guess none of this is meant to be foreshadowing of anything, but today we learnt that Tamsyn has mentioned broom cupboards once per book, which is a funny coincidence unless here actually is a reveal somewhere in Alecto and she's just planted the phrase throughout to spook us in future readings.

… Maybe I should go think about something else.

(*pacing back and forth* I still think Abigail's “alongside” coment implies God's chambers are isolated from the restof the building and require entry through the River… it's “alongside” this dimension…)

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So in Ntn Camilla asks: “Warden—will she know who we are, in the River?” And I am obsessed with what this line says about Camilla. Cam is loving (see her interactions with Nona and Pyrrah, her ferocious search for her sister) and kind (she takes the knives from Jeannemary and Isaac, she shares her food with Gideon) but she is also stubborn and singleminded and even brusque to the point of being quite abrasive. When Harrow tells her Palamedes can’t have lasted this long she simply reiterates that he has. When Pyrrah tells her to stop, she ignores her. When she thinks her fathers won’t get Paul, she simply doesn’t invite them to her death/ascencion. 

The ONLY hesitation she shows (in the entire series, not just about Paul), the only concern she expresses, is for Dulcinea, “will she know who we are, in the river?” To me this shows so much love and care and even vulnerability. She wants to see Dulcinea. She plans on meeting her someday after death. She does not fear the disappearance of herself unless it means Dulcinea won��t know her. Sometimes the Dulcinea relationship get portrayed as ‘Palamedes was in love with her and Camilla was on the side/a third wheel/possibly even annoyed or left out” but to me this line obliterates that. Cam is not a gushy person, but she must love Dulcie so much. Hers is the only concern she acknowledges. 

Long story short, Cam may not be expressive, but never let it be said she doesn’t love Dulcinea Septimus. 

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the severed floor, part 1

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its all 'be gay do crime' until a black person starts making allusions to drugs or sex or god forbid VIOLENCE and then it turns out nobody can handle anything more hardcore than downloading illegal torrents of hamilton