Stay Alert! Trust No One! Keep Your Laser Handy!

I'm just keeping my head down today. Really. There will be no braindump today.

But! As a consolation, oh Gods let this be true, oh please, oh please, oh please... Fafblog is back! Please, Fafnir, don't let this be a one-shot April Fools. We love you! We really do!

For those unfamiliar with Fafnir, Giblets, and The Medium Lobster, if you want your politics written with wry, satirical humor and peppered with utter brilliance, you can't do better than Fafblog!

Vive Fáfnir! Vive Gibléts! Radical Fafbloggists demand a new era of Fafno-Gibletsian rule over the cosmos, and none will be able to stand in our way!

Steampunk, Gaslight, Cthulhoid, Pirate Babes!

Jeff Vandemeer brings us Squidpunk!, a new movement and a new anthology!

The scary thing is, I had a half-hearted start at a squidpunk trilogy already, The Reef. It was doing okay; I'd fiddle with in now and then. Only that damned Disney film killed it.

Not paying attention to what I'm reading...

So, I was reading a story the other day on my ebook reader, a coming-out story of sorts, in which a woman is talking about her girlfriend to her mother. I came across this snippet:

It was obvious from her expression that her initial assessment of Linda did not match with Missy's description of the delightfully frenetic woman. Missy could only hope that of the two descriptions the second one, the one filled with joy and pleasure and consternation, would come to dominate. In the meantime, her words washed up against the shore of her mother's bigotry and left their pearls and shells.

I stopped for a moment and thought, damn, that was gorgeous: "wash up against the shore of her mother's bigotry and left their pearls and shells." It was the "and shells" part that really did it for me, the way it says when we talk we leave not just perfect ideas, but sometimes shattered ones, broken ones, ones that might not mean anything at all. I thought to myself, damn, why can't I write like that?

And then I remembered: Oh, yeah, I did write that. It's an unreleased Misuko and Linia story.

And now I'm wondering why I can't seem to write like that any more.

Fabulous Muppet Mashup

whipartist should not watch this. She's already made her feelings plain.

Even after I knew what it was, I couldn't stop watching until the end. Men and women of a certain age will probably agree.