Kara Dreamer (obsolete) ⚧ @kara_dreamer@witches.town

I intend to get really high tonight, in search of self-knowledge, but the gods are seeing fit to make me sweat to acquire my substances, culminating in my putting my foot into a hole and taking a painful tumble on the way back from the weed store

also why is it so flippin' difficult to find cone incense

also never try to hit multiple locations by bus, it's guaranteed pain

idly wondering if anyone's researched linguistic shifts in how American politicians have referred to the people, en masse, in speeches and advertisements and so forth. in particular I'm curious about whether there's been a trend towards referring to people in strictly economic terms (e.g. "consumers", "taxpayers"; see also that much-beloved phrase "the middle class")

#unpopularopinion Maybe he improved in "Preacher"--I've never been inclined to find out--but on the evidence of "Hellblazer" Garth Ennis writes adolescent horror-porn rubbish. can't stand what he did to one of my favorite comics

me vs. executive dysfunction (which is heavy on me today)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGeoB8czHo8

oh, let me pick the #followFriday / #ff winners. as usual, it's decided by dice rolls based off my followers list, so I might end up accidentally picking abandoned or otherwise obsolete accounts...sorry!

Picking seven this time.

@green

@Dimduning

@jk

@Sailorplutoid

@draco

@abbenm

@ThatVeryQuinn

the dice, like tricksters, never lie...but that's not quite the same as being able to trust the results. *chuckles*

So far I've only seen Coyote's first appearance in the comic. I've had my own experience with a trickster, albeit a harder-edged and meaner one than Coyote (at least, as I tend to perceive both him and Loki.)

...interesting that when Antimony says, "forgive me if I do not immediately take the word of The Trickster", my first reaction was, "but tricksters never exactly _lie_, do they?"

Antimony has a bit of the "chosen one" air about her, a hint of the same choking, suffocating, golden fog that surrounds Harry Potter and makes it difficult, for me anyway, to regard him as a real human being. (I truly admire those who can manage it, like the fanfic writers.) To be fair, Antimony has more of a legit reason: she's been trafficking with the numinous since she was very young in a way that would probably send most of us off the deep end if it kept up, and it's made her blasé (e.g. in her dealings with Coyote) in a more or less believable way.

Still, she's been DAMN lucky so far, and I trust that her luck will run out.

And because the writing is so much better, I'm having ambiguous feelings about "Gunnerkrigg"'s protagonist, Antimony. (just the sort of name to appeal to a chemist.) She reminds me a lot of Daria--not girlfriend Daria, but MTV Daria. And like MTV Daria, Antimony verges on the dislikable for me. She's let her intelligence and broader perspective get ahead of her, just a little bit, like a nerd who's gotten just a little too into "rationalism". She's jealous without acknowledging it, and it comes through in little nasty ways (e.g. yanking Alistair abruptly into the air to prove a point about him.)

But where Rowling and Harry Potter _really_ fail horribly isn't with the magical or fantasy material, it's with the everyday pedestrian stuff of YA fiction. That's where "Gunnerkrigg Court" _really_ impresses me: it's giving me believable schoolchildren with believable adolescent problems, not posturing stereotypes with sitcom problems. Even the bullying is better. Kat gets real taunts that hurt from her peers, who have unfortunately very plausible (if awful) reasons for treating Kat the way they do. Harry Potter gets theatrical sneering from a shallow liberal's comic-opera idea of what a bigot is like.

the comparison with Harry Potter is a lazy one, maybe, but really I keep getting reminders as I work through "Gunnerkrigg" of just how fumbling and inept J. K. Rowling is at handling similar material. Her notions about magic and mystery are superficial, flash, usually failing to evoke even a hint of awe and wonder--yes, Rowling is writing to a lower reading level perhaps, but hell even Japanese shows for selling superhero toys to kids are capable of hitting deeper depths than Harry Potter.

This half-page of "Gunnerkrigg" is more profound than anything in HP from start to finish. http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=336 https://witches.town/media/a00sU3v7hrCaLEiltQI

Now that I have a job that allows me intermittent use of the Internet but usually only for a minute or so at a time, working through a webcomic seemed like a good idea, and I decided to pick up "Gunnerkrigg Court" again, rereading most of the material I'd tried to read back in November. I'm a bit more than 400 pages in now and, goddamn, where has this comic been all my life? It's already made me cry a couple times (e.g. Kat's week with Alistair, and Antimony's youthful encounter with the boy who killed himself and his family playing with a cigarette lighter.)

I am so glad that I finally pushed through my mental block against reading new material, and have finally bitten deep into "Gunnerkrigg Court". My girlfriend Daria has printed volumes and has been pushing me to read the comic for months, and I even tried to start reading them--at the worst possible time, when I was in Scottsdale, Arizona last November, mere days after I'd been abruptly dumped and while I was keeping Daria company in hospital as she recovered from her bottom surgery. I wasn't able to focus worth a damn and eventually I just settled for watching Megaranger and swallowing valerian to calm myself.

Damn, I wonder how many of the accounts I'm following are still active...I should maybe do some housekeeping

so, I want to educate myself a bit more on #autism, seeing as how I might peg the spectrum. needless to say Google is a bit of a horror here, and I tend to prefer texts anyway. anyone got any reading lists?