me: Chuck Tingle's Living Object books are cute but IDK if I totally get it.

also me: Trebuchets are so much sexier than catapults. In this essay I will

Nina Bean, a small but chonky grey tabby cat with green eyes, sitting at attention with a serious expression as she waits outside the bathroom for her human to emerge safely.

Beanie looks so serious when she's guarding me! She's waited outside (or inside!) the bathroom nearly every time I go in there since the 2020 tornado.

I love to watch dudes react to the original HTTYD because they start off a little skeptical like "Is this really as amazing as everyone says?" and 20 minutes later they're like "I would literally die for Toothless."

I have no maternal instinct, but I do have the inborn primal urge to make a joke so comprehensively terrible that my teenage niece and nephew, who can't agree that the sky is blue, are temporarily united in belief that I am The Worst.

That last one is still finding its way!

I tried to describe the three WIPs I'm choosing amongst and got this:

1. Gays fight to save the Earth from aliens
2. Magic lesbians decide the fate of a lost desert city
3. Magic beat cop gets accidentally soulbonded to her top suspect in a murder, and it's also about colonialism I GUESS?????

I feel a little bad for the people whose job it is to design beautiful boxes for skin care products 'cause I always just rip into them like a crazed raccoon trying to break into a cybertruck.

Why did I wake up at 7:15 this morning? It's like my circadian rhythm decided to betray everything I am!

Sticker is Fiery Eye by Arianwen44 on RedBubble, and it shows a cartoony Sauron in his fair form, in all black with a spiky crown, yellow eyes, and red-orange hair that falls to the ground and becomes flames. He's frowning in great displeasure.

This is how your email finds me

Dude, it's a little soon to be bothering me to return the copyedit of a file you only sent TWELVE HOURS AGO, seven of which I was asleep for.

Truly do not know how we are expected to still just be doing normal things right now. I'm like breathless with rage over 12 things at any given moment and have to let it out in little yelps throughout the day or I might explode

I've had enough of living in genteel poverty. Can I at least give living in tacky wealth a try?

I realized I never linked my self-indulgent Mononoke fic over here! archiveofourown.org/works/60492043. #mononoke2007 #fanfic #kusuriurikayo

If my also-autistic nephew and I ever have the same special interest, it's gonna be LIT. No one will be able to come within ten feet of us without involuntarily learning something like 17 interesting differences between a barquentine and a schooner.

Clearly much of Gen X mentally filed it in the "imaginary places" category as kids and then just never revisited that until something made us think about it.

The last time I posted about remembering this, a friend of mine about my age said "Wait... NIMH is real?" :')

Reminded again of when, as an editor in my *30s*, I first encountered "National Institute of Mental Health" and "NIMH" actually written side by side and yelled "NIMH IS *REAL*?!"

I'd like to think my most on-brand tweet was something witty or insightful but lbr it was probably the one that went "I have never yet been so drunk that i can't type 'Kusuriuri' right on the first try."

I'm an editor and can't count the number of times I've been clued in that someone used AI to cheat at writing a chapter or book because it thinks something like "arbitrary wooded area" is a perfectly good algorithm name. (It's "random forest." "Unified Realm" for "United Kingdom" was another doozy.)

Happy anniversary to this tweet (streak still ongoing btw).

Other Gen Xers who have the relevant step in their skincare routine have to say "ESSENCE! VITAL ESSENCE!" every time, right? It's not just me?

I didn't want to put images in a quote post, so here are the two images that are the beginning of my current WIP. Art by the amazing Zee Coshow!

The first line in my current WIP is a Wanted poster with this text:

WANTED
Ophelie Estlin
Rebel Council magician. 32 years old, 160 cm, brown hair, gray eyes, Vertoz East ancestry. Affinity: fire. Strength: 7, Council New Scale.

A nice thing about having cats as an anxious person is that when I hear a weird sound at night now, my first instinct isn't to be scared, it's to yell "NINA!" and go back to sleep.

receipt for donation to Trans Lifeline

Just donated to Trans Lifeline to help our friends and family being persecuted by this new regime. IF you have some $ to spare, please consider doing likewise? Even a few bucks helps. But if not, some real LOUD support from the cis community would also be great. ❤️

link: translifeline.org/donate/

Word to the wise: flaked-off bits of black nail polish can look enough like mouse poops to fool the anxious or unwary.

Neither Publix nor Bed Bath & Beyond has scrubbed its DEI info from its website. Sadly low bar to clear, but at least they cleared it! BBB also made Juneteenth a company holiday in 2023, so I guess those two places will get the business I used to give to Target, which caved to the fascists.

a colorful hand drawing of the Medicine Seller from Mononoke holding an origami crane, with a background of a feathered crane and some single eyes reminiscent of the exorcism seals in the show

Adjusting cats to Kusuriuri ratio. :D This is the first thing I ever commissioned from the lovely Zee!

The hard copy of this lives on the wall in my home office, from which it was dramatically rescued in 2020 after the tornado hit but before the ceiling fell in.

there's nothing wrong with me that spending six months at the seaside heavily medicated won't cure