Counting Nothings

my other grounding technique is remembering that the earliest abolitionists & the earliest suffragists had no proof that the world would ever make possible what they fought for and indeed many of them did not live to see it come to pass. and yet they did not succumb to despair so it would be disrespectful to their memory to let it overtake me

tbh foreign policy was listed as the least important issue for exit polls, arab and muslim heavy states like minnesota and michigan are not what lost harris the vote, and jill stein got under like one percent. everyone making this about leftists who didnt vote either pro or against is making something out of basically nothing. americans are fundamentally boring and apolitical and above all completely self centered. they do not give a fuck about the suffering of people in palestine or ukraine. they just know that gas was cheaper 4 years ago or whatever. the amount of incredibly normal people i know who arent even right wing so much as just sort of uneducated and incurious about any issues / had no interests beyond like big ten sports or binge drinking or getting ahead at work and getting rich are voting for him not people who agonized over a single thing ever. this is unfortunately a non issue bc americans dont care about anything but themselves, you just happen to be around small groups of the exception

The data agrees. Most Harris voters were voting against Trump and a conservative Supreme Court, most Trump voters were voting against high grocery prices and immigrants.

its almost as if trumps loss in 2020 was in-fact a bellwether for the continued rise of neo-fascism... its almost like, just maybe, when a liberal party responds to reactionary ideologies with centrism and militant nationalism it doesn't exactly offer a counter to fascism but instead offers nutritive soil for its roots to grow... you could almost argue that a state that extracts its power from violent exploitation will inevitably fall to fascism... perhaps, just maybe, this is the inherent trajectory of a nation built on genocide... weird...

Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time (2024)

I'm still hung up on Magnus, earnestly telling an 18-year-old that she needs to give up her one friend and love because sometimes you strike out.

WHILE HE'S WITH HIS WIFE THAT HE GOT TO MARRY AND BE WITH FOR QUITE A FEW YEARS!!!

B. R. U. H. Incapable of reading the room... er, bubble in the river.

Even Abigail Pent, who is so bad at social norms she has to regularly be reigned in, thinks he goes a bit hard on that one, to be fair.

But in Magnus' defence, I don't think he's failing to read the room. He may have always been substantially more privileged than Gideon, and he may be drawing on much more mundane experiences, but he knows, intimately, what it means to be in a relationship that straddles the divides of status and acceptability and to watch the woman you love die in front of you because of the whole rotten set up of it. And I suspect he's giving Harrow the advice he might hope Abigail would be given in her place.

This is actually one of my favorite parts of HtN, because in context of everything we the readers know, of course you would fight for Gideon. This is a book where magic is real! Love Conquers All! But the thing is.... Magnus' advice is normal, in the context of Gideon is dead. She died. She is 100% no longer alive and Harrow does not want her to be dead and she is dealing with it Badly.

To me, a core aspect of HtN is that it is a wish fulfillment story about grief. Therefore it is thematically important that the people telling Harrow to "move on" are NOT just people who are using her, like John/Ianthe/etc. Magnus cares about Harrow, on a very genuine level, and he tells her what anyone who cares about you tells you when someone you love dies and you want to set the world on fire: she loved you, she is dead, you shouldn't let yourself die with her. You can live for her.

And like, no one wants to hear that. It's good advice!! It is kind. It is loving. But when someone you love is dead, you don't want kind and loving advice. You want your person to be alive. You want the kind and loving person to shut up. And in this situation, Harrow DOES says no, I won't accept that, and she's *rewarded* for it, a thing that never happens in the real world if someone dies and you refuse to accept it. But Harrow is rewarded. Gideon's soul is saved. Wish fulfilled.

Gonna wear my Sailor Mars Girl Scout (pics are from Colossalcon last year). My friends and I had a great time coming up with these! The joke of ‘Sailor Girl Scouts’ has been floating around for years….. but we couldn’t find any instances of costumes like this before, and were surprised by that. We based the look off of the Girl Scouts Cadette (junior high) dress uniform from the 50s-60s.

It was so much fun to put together all the patches and pick things that were unique references to each of our chosen characters. Especially proud of the Girl Scout troop number being 1991 as a nod to when the manga debuted.

Inktober day 25: "Sinister." Death Valley National Park

Day 26: "Baroque." Great Basin National Park

Day 27: "Honk." Haleakalā National Park

Day 28: "Obscure." Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve

An embroidery of the Wikipedia page for embroidery.

That can't be right, can it? the 2000's weren't THAT long ago??

Inktober day 21: "Serrated." Glacier Bay National Park

Day 22: "Panoply." Biscayne National Park

Day 23: "Bubbles." Virgin Islands National Park

Day 24: Martinet." Guadalupe Mountains National Park

So, I've been binge-reading (if you can even call it that when I had to wait three weeks for library holds between the first and second books) the locked tomb series this month because I've seen it come across my dash. So, of course, the first thing I did when I finished Nona the Ninth is check out the tags of folks who I knew had read them.

I was so far into doing that when I realized that John Gaius is the formulaic Lyctor name. Not that his lyctors could have known when they didn't know where Alecto's soul (or body) came from, but it is so obvious!

Also, in Harrow the 9th, he says that AL was his "Adam", but then it is revealed that he made her body from his ribs, so really, shouldn't she be his Eve?

Things cats were right about all along: