It’s Pride Month Eve, so leave out some milk for Freddie Mercury and his cats.

They’re looking at each other, comparing cats:

And Vincent Price was also bi so, y'know, let’s hear it for the bi pride catboys.

I have a story that’s topical; I’ve told it before on tumblr, but it’s topical to this and thus worth repeating.

Back around 2005, I ran into a Baptist missionary who spotted my kippah and basically took that as permission to attempt to missionize at me.

I defended myself, using the basics of the knowledge I have of Christian theology and texts that I learned specifically to fend off missionaries.

We went back and forth and back and forth, and he wouldn’t leave me alone for… oh, probably the better part of an hour.

And then…

Then this part is seared into my memory. I have nightmares about it.

He smiled at me and said that, with my knowledge of the Gospels, I am sure to be one of the Elect when the time comes.

I asked what the hell that meant.

And he told me. He told me in a tone of utmost sincerity–even envy, because to his belief system, it was a good and enviable thing…

Because to be one of the “Elect” is to be one of the 144,000 Jews who accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior at the Apocalypse. This will happen when all of the Children of Israel have been Gathered in the Land of Israel; war will break out, the Assembled Jews will have the Gospels preached to us, and 144,000 Thousand–Twelve Tribes times Twelve Apostles times One Thousand–Jews will spontaneously convert to Christianity.

Once that occurs, all of the Jews die in the Apocalypse, but the Elect ascend to Heaven to be Jesus Christ’s personal escorts down to Earth for his Second Coming (the rest of the Jews go to hell for eternity, in case you’re wondering).

In short…

He told me that I existed to be a human blood sacrifice to bring back his god. I was not a person to him. I was nothing more than a means to that end.

And he was jealous. Jealous of the fact that he viewed my knowledge of his religion, something that I had learned specifically to fend him and his kind off, as proof that his religion was right and correct and inevitable. That in learning it, I had made myself more valuable to his worldview.

Jealous that, because I was more valuable, because I existed to die for his god, I would meet that god before him.

It was terrifying, to be told that I was to die… and he thought that it was a good thing.

This is how Evangelicals view death. Not as something to be avoided, but something to seek, something that is a positive, and not just for themselves… but for everybody.

They are the closest thing to a full-fledged Religion of Evil on the planet, and I say that without hyperbole.

When you guys say the US is being controlled by a death cult, you werent kidding!

I grew up in the “Bible Belt”: Middle Tennessee, the very heart of this movement.

Please do not believe for a moment that @the-library-alcove is exaggerating or blowing this out of proportion even a little bit. This whole concept defines the thinking for many people down there.

I was asked to be a pallbearer at a friend’s funeral. I had to sit in the front pew while a Southern Baptist Minister preached this very “gospel”, and singled out which of the deceased’s family were going to Hell, and I had to just sit and take it.

This is exactly who they are and what they are like. And yes, they are dangerous. They are anti-intellectual, their whole identity is based around being both Chosen of God and Highly Persecuted (while persecuting anyone who deviates from their understanding of God’s Will), and they consider the law of the land to be entirely secondary and subsidiary to their understanding of “God’s Law”.

And yes, they are a death cult. With Pro-Life bumper stickers.

Encounter: the Magdeburg Unicorn

That should be a race in your fantasy world.

My favorite quote from any movie critic ever is from Roger Ebert, who once said “The Borg Queen looks like no notion of sexy I have ever heard of, but inspires me to keep an open mind”

i thought this was a joke, but. uh. nope.

Heartwarming! The world's ugliest fucking fish ever has been fed a snack

that fish is HIS FRIEND!!

excerpt:

There are many benefits to being a marine biologist.

Video of a kitten at a vet’s office protesting loudly as it’s scooped from the floor. Another kitten turns around the corner and walks up to the camera, also protesting loudly for its friend. From here.

I am so glad I’m not the only person who saw the second kitten as a muppet.

Gnomes, according to late medieval swiss occultist and doctor Paracelsus, are actually elemental spirits that inhabit and administer all solids. If something is solid, it's because of gnomes.

Thank you gnomes

Earthy Gnomes, in my home

makes the walls good and strong

Elemental, mountain shorty

In my home, Earthy Gnomes

One last thing I’ve been poking at today regarding the issue of the letters. A small glimmer of something other than miserable to take away. 

It’s not a whole silver lining. A copper one at best, and barely there. But the fact of Jonathan’s cleverness with this attempt at sending out a message and the shorthand itself was a small victory.

The big spotlight is on all the defeats in this entry. The foiled attempt at sending private messages. The ruined hope that Jonathan can rely on his fellow human beings for help. The mockery and crushing of spirit in the burned letter to Mina along with being forced to reseal Hawkins’ now-pointless note and being locked in the room for misbehaving. It’s nothing but endless salt in too many wounds. Jonathan is in no state to harvest anything but despondency from the night’s display.

But.

There is something here that is worth noting. And that’s Dracula’s reaction to that shorthand note itself. What are the exact words? The exact actions?

“–one is from you, and to my friend Peter Hawkins; the other"—here he caught sight of the strange symbols as he opened the envelope, and the dark look came into his face, and his eyes blazed wickedly—"the other is a vile thing, an outrage upon friendship and hospitality! It is not signed. Well! so it cannot matter to us.“ And he calmly held letter and envelope in the flame of the lamp till they were consumed.

Now obviously, the whole show of waving the letters in Jonathan’s face was a sadistic power play. Just proof positive of his influence and Jonathan’s uninterrupted helplessness, plus an extra dash of renewed hopelessness. All good fun. Right up until he opens the shorthand letter and sees those strange symbols. He doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t feign being puzzled by a stranger’s letter–so it must be!–getting in with Jonathan’s letter to Hawkins.

Just like the moment with the mirror and the bloody cut, just like the surprise of the ladies moving in on Jonathan without permission, Dracula is confronted by something that makes a big ugly crack in the careful masquerade he’s been enjoying so far. He likes this game. He likes being literal king of the castle and playing the host and pulling Jonathan’s spirit apart like so many loose unhappy threads. Most importantly, he likes being the one holding all the cards. All the information. We’ll see later in the book just how well others’ ignorance is used as a cudgel to beat any of his would-be obstacles into paste.

But now, here’s the shorthand. A thing Jonathan knows and he does not.

And Dracula is trapped by the performance. The letter’s already assigned as a prop, a stranger’s note, it cannot matter to them, Jonathan’s letters are sacred to him, blah blah. But if the shorthand is a stranger’s, he can’t even wheedle Jonathan to divulge it for him. So it’s stuck as a surprise mystery. Small as it is, ultimately futile as it is, it’s still A Thing Dracula Did Not Plan. A Thing Dracula Does Not Know. A Card Dracula Does Not Hold.

And Count Dracula, as will be revealed, is many things in addition to being a monster: including an utter control freak. Classic gothic edition mastermind. Every t crossed, every i dotted, every detail and solicitor in their proper place. Now here’s his pet-guest-prisoner not only doing a no-no by trying to reach out to others behind his back, but flaunting some 19th century secret cipher right under his nose! The nerve! Granted, he did tear open the letter to snoop on it, but such trifles don’t matter here. 

What matters is Dracula’s reaction being one that briefly breaks through the guise of the game. A genuine sour note that nettles him into burning the letter outright with a sneer and then, happily, steering immediately back on track with Hawkins’ letter and Jonathan’s timeout. Again, it’s a small thing. A mere mote.

But I’d bet money that part of Dracula’s ‘many labors’ ahead of him now include an almost petulant scrounging through his books for any mention of those odd symbols so he can snap it up too. Research he must do alone, at a loss, because Jonathan unwittingly arranged his writing in such a way that it endangers the Count’s game if the latter has to admit the writing was Jonathan’s after all. So he’s left to huff and puff over it in private. Because all the information under this roof is supposed to be his, damn it. 

And Jonathan, trapped and cornered and bereft prisoner that he is, proved that it isn’t.

May he plow the Lord’s fields in heaven

Dave Brandt was probably the longest running no-till farmer in the state; he'd been running his land no-till since 1971. He experimented with fertilizers, cover crops, and different irrigation techniques and he'd been doing all of that for a very long time.

The guy was an institution all on his own; look at this.

The most dangerous of Ollie's arrows

Bad luck for this fiend!

"The Black Cat Arrow didn't work! I'll have to use... the Broken Mirror Arrow!"

"Wait, so is that a small mirror on an arrow that will break when it hits them?"

"No, no, there's a chance the mirror wouldn't break, so that won't do. The Broken Mirror Arrow just has shards of a broken mirror at the tip!"

"So... a jagged glass arrowhead?"

"BROKEN MIRROR ARROW!"

(The actual story this is from is delightfully bonkers.)

downside: going to have to include a picture of the Giza pyramids in the slides for the lecture upside: i get to give people a crash course in why perspective matters in two frames, because

followed by

is such a funny sequence

i find most people who haven't seen it in person don't know that cairo is RIGHT THERE

I loved these perspectives so I took some of my own when I was in Cairo and yeah, they're literally just. Right there. Pass em on your way to work, nbd

No, y'all don't even understand.

There is literally a Pizza Hut across the street from the pyramids.

That Pizza Hut among other things is why Egyptologists laugh their asses off when we see another piece of media where the protagonists get "lost in the desert near the pyramids", because it's like... just turn around my dudes you're only a seven min walk away from the nearest fastfood shop

Yall don't know how much I adore all of this

Funny how that works

I am so pleased at how many notes are some version of “I don’t fear the science, I fear the corporations who control it” because that is EXACTLY the attitude you should have. GMOs can save us. Monsanto will kill us.

what people fear about GMO- ‘theyre gonna make frankencarrots that crave human flesh and cause diarrhea ’ what GMO actually is- ‘we made rice crop that is both drought resistant and flood resistant which will prevent about 20% of major famine disasters, also it now makes vitamin A because vitamin A deficiency in poverty stricken areas is a major killer of kids as most vitamin A rich foods dont grow there’ what people SHOULD be upset about- ‘i made all crops sterile so all farmers have to buy the seed from me in perpetuity and i will sue anyone who tries to go back to crops that produce their own seed’

^^^ THIS

SO MUCH THIS

Bookbinding resources masterpost!

Although I've only made one casebound so far, I've recieved multiple requests to make a tutorial. And well, I'm not that good. But I can share some of the online resources that have helped me.

• Youtube

• Tumblr

•Reddit

•Other

I will update this as I find more sources! I'm still learning.

I've always thought of Spare Parts as 'the overrated one', because I always saw it called 'the best Doctor Who story', and then I listened to it and like, it's okay. It's good. If you like that sort of thing, then yeah it's great. But that's a heck of a leap. I never got the hype.

But after watching through all of Classic Who I think I understand it more, because Classic Who really just doesn't care about all the things that, in my mind, make the Cybermen stand out. The fact that they used to be people, that they convert others, even that they get rid of their emotions isn't really touched on more than one introductory line per story, certainly not with any depth. Some of The Tenth Planet, some of Tomb of the Cybermen, and that one scene in Earthshock are about the only times any of those ideas get stressed, and the rest of the time they really may as well be an army of evil alien robots.

So at the time it came out, Spare Parts must have been by far the most in-depth exploration of the villains. I think I took that for granted, having grown up with The Age of Steel (which itself was heavily influenced by Spare Parts) and all the stories after it that took their cue from it.

@thetransgirlwhoneverwas Yeah it's interesting that both the story often held up as the best Cybermen story and the one often held up as the best Dalek story (Genesis of the Daleks), both having been called the best Doctor Who story, are both extremely bleak.

I'm not arguing those claims if people want to make them, because they're good stories, and I tend to agree that there's some really great bleak Doctor Who out there (see also the popularity of Live 34, and I'm sure other examples if you look for them. The Angel of History and probably other Bernice Summerfield stories come to mind). It's just interesting how bleak tales can bring out good writing and enjoyment (Not all the time though. See Nekromanteia).

Though amazing bleak stories don't often make it to the top spot of my list of favourites, because being so bleak means I don't always want to relisten to them (Though there's probably exceptions, like things by Joseph Lidster or Robert Shearman).

I wouldn’t call it the best Doctor Who story but I would say Spare Parts is one of my fave Cybermen stories because it does a lot of good stuff with the tragedy of their origins

"Spare Parts" (a tragedy) does what "Age of Steel" (a drama) failed to do as a Cyberman origin (IMHO).

It outlines a failing society where the Cybermen are the end result of decades of gradual cybernetic enhancements, all logical and all reasonable, especially in a world becoming more hostile to unenhanced humans. Even horses can be enhanced.

Age of Steel, had the chance to show us a world where being part cybernetic was par for the course (so builders might have cybernetic arms for heavy lifting, chest units are common for those with normally debilitating illnesses or, perhaps more disturbingly (if giving the game away somewhat) Ricky's grandmother, who had been blind on Mickey's Earth, could see on Ricky's Earth via a VISOR like affair which had the telltale teardrop designs. Some hint that this is a gradual process of acceptance.

Instead we went from "ear-buds" to "brain in a can" with no interim steps.

Spare Parts is a tragedy in the proper sense of the word, because it had to be a tragedy for the Cybermen to exist. Even if not everyone literally dies, who they are dies through conversion.

Also I think what makes Spare Parts scarier is that the villains are characters who have already become too far gone as they’ve cyber-converted themseves to survive the situation on Mondas

While Lumic in Age of Steel has a warped idea that what he’s doing is altruistic he’s still a person and he has human emotions and motives. The villains in Spare Parts are acting this way because they have removed their ability to see anything wrong about acting this way. Right or wrong doesn’t enter into the equation, they only know that this is a logical way to solve a problem their species is encountering

And it also makes them more tragic because its entirely possible they once would have been horrified by whats happening but they’ve cut out their ability to be horrified.

how to properly structure a query letter!*

Dear [Agent], 

[An optional brief introduction, no longer than 2 - 3 sentences, perhaps where you elaborate on the #ownvoices of your manuscript, or pointing out certain things in your manuscript that the agent asks for. I reiterate that this paragraph is optional. Unless you have a very specific reason to be querying this agent—for instance, if they tweeted an MSWL for a heist novel and you’re querying a heist novel—there is no relevance, so don’t include this paragraph.]

[The first paragraph of your summary introduces the world, the main character, and their Normal. For instance, Cynthia lives in the times of a pandemic and works to continue living in their new normal. Every day, Cynthia choose to get up and keep living and making the most of their situation while trying to find something to do to be useful.] 

[The second paragraph of your summary introduces the plot. To continue with the above idea, Cynthia has been tasked with trying to find a cure to coronavirus, but all they have to work with in their home is duct tape, tangerines, Tylenol, and a never-give-up attitude.] 

[The third paragraph introduces stakes, aka what will happen if Cynthia doesn’t discover a cure with the resources they have at home. Luckily for them, however, a woman named Jane they had a one night stand with needs a place to crash after she was evicted. Cynthia agrees to let her stay as their roommate, especially because Jane brings with her the missing ingredient to the cure for coronavirus, a magic bean she stole from a giant–but there’s only one magic bean. If Cynthia and Jane can’t find a way to make more beans, they might be sent to the realm of giants forever.] 

[The closing paragraph goes like this: Complete at 89,000 words, THE MAGIC BEAN is an Adult contemporary fantasy with potential for a companion novel. I believe it will appeal to fans of Erin Morgenstern and Naomi Novik. Briefly explain who you are and share what you’re comfortable with about yourself—I say I’m 26, headed to grad school for archiving, and that the book is #ownvoices for genderqueer representation. Also mention if you have any connection to the publishing industry. I mention who I was previously represented by, why we amicably parted ways, and that I’ve mentored in many writing contests.] 

[Final closure: Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to hearing from you again!] 

[Best,]

[My name]

[My phone number and, though optional, my twitter handle] 

*i’ve been in the publishing industry for nine years now, have mentored many authors who went on to be published by the Big 5, and worked in writing contests to help writers, not only with their manuscript, but with their pitch and query letter and comps etc. i know what i’m about 😉

They also usually have free wifi. One of the few places you can use the wifi without being expected to buy something.

on the announcement that Disney+ is removing a plethora of shows and films from its service, please read these tweets from Willow writer John Bickerstaff. this is not a tax writeoff like Batgirl, because these projects have already been released. this is a move designed to cut off financial support in the form of residuals, and break the spirit of the strike. here is the deadline article that lists the films/shows that will be removed.

as always, donate to the entertainment community fund, vocally support the WGA online and irl, or join a picket in a major US city if you can. let them know they can't keep getting away with things like this.