Beyond the grace of God, a wanderer in the outer darkness
New novel CUCKOO out 6/11/24 from Tor Nightfire
pfp by
@theomayscough
Repped by
@dreamoforgonon
After 12 years, I'm logging out. I can't thank the friends and readers I've met on here enough.
This account will continue to post updates for the Deadlights Theater and my books and film crit, but if you need to contact me you can do so at gretchen.felker.martin @ gmail . com
The idea that a world ruled by women would be a kinder or gentler one is, in its own way, deeply misogynistic. Women are complete people. This entails a capacity for cruelty and an inability to cope with holding power over others without enacting violence and oppression.
"Where do I stand on the -- on the WHAT? The "Transgender Question"? Well for one thing, sir, I recall the last few usages of that particular phraseology. A group of millions is not a question -- I have not yet finished speaking -- not a question, but a demographic."
french horror is like "the skin... an ill-fitting garment for my sordid existence..." and italian horror is like "oh no frangela, knife-hands the serial stabber has escaped from knife prison"
The Green Knight cost 15 million and looks better than basically anything that has ever cost over a hundred million. Money is fake and craft is everything.
AFAB: Assigned female at birth
AMAB: Assigned male at birth
ACAB: All cops are bastards
AHAB: Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink a-
Twin Peaks is a perfect demonstration of how to make a murder mystery about the victim rather than the killer and that lesson has been resolutely ignored by all subsequent "a beautiful girl got murdered" fiction.
I have absolutely no problem saying the shooter isn't non-binary and that his attempt to cast himself as such is nakedly false and manipulative. I have a working brain and understand this bears no relation to misgendering newly out trans people.
Every time we grind our teeth at J. K. Rowling, we should instead thank christ that Roald Dahl died before he could start tweeting the worst shit imaginable.
Elon changing the terms so it's okay to call trans people pedophiles and groomers on a whim and then immediately banning the first person to do it to him is so exhausting, you can't even crack a joke about it. He's so pathetic. A worm.
I shit you not, I turned on NPR and heard "we've spent today listening to the native peoples of the Arctic, but there's one group with a huge stake in the area's future we haven't heard from -- the oil and gas companies"
The thing about SKINAMARINK is that the kids do not at any point have a video camera. The only explanaton for the footage we're seeing is that it's been curated for us by the entity tormenting them, like a home movie/snuff film.
i don't know what you can say about a nation so obsessed with bloodlines and ethnic purity that it shoves cattle prods up dead soldiers' assholes to harvest their sperm that the whole thing doesn't say for itself, you know?
So much of culture writing & online discourse is 2 million mostly professional class coastal liberals talking to each other, and it's unhealthy. You don't have to be lowbrow, but for God's sake, it's a big country. Show a little curiosity about what everyone else is watching.
It's all "be gay, do crime" until it's a trans woman performing actual meaningful resistance to hegemony, then the tenderqueers start wringing their hands and finding reasons to dissociate from her.
Learning that a disabled queer artist lost her health insurance, her home, and finally her life to suicide after colleagues got her fired for the high crime of... drawing INVADER ZIM porn. I'm speechless.
"IT DOESN' MADDA WHEDDA THEY'RE IN DA MATRIX OR NOT; CONSCIOUSNESS IS ITS OWN PRISON, AN' DA FIVE SENSES AH' ITS WARDENS! DA TRUTH IS, YEH JUST AFRAID *WE'RE* IN DA MATRIX, AN' EVEN IN A BOUNDLESS DIGITAL WONDAHLAND YEH LIVIN A COWAHD'S LIFE, LIKE A DOG!"
seeing some shit like "Special effects for The Creature" in the credits is maybe the single best indication you're about to watch an absolute fuckin banger
If you accuse artists of condoning or even DOING awful or uncomfortable things depicted in their art with no proof beyond that depiction and your reaction to it, you are an unsafe and destructive person who has not yet learned to navigate adult society.
Remember when a bunch of cowardly sci-fi authors hemmed and hawed and said it was "complicated" to work for arms manufacturers and we shouldn't judge them for it?
From a journalist in Gaza— the missiles raining down are American made, by arms manufacturer Woodward, located in Fort Collins, Colorado. A reminder of how all settler colonial violence is interdependent.
I cannot for the life of me understand why people think shit like this means a single goddamn thing. A book can be about Russians. Russians are people, not orcs from Mordor.
it's insane that people still think, against literally all anecdotal and scientific evidence, that predators target conventionally attractive women at a disproportionate rate when in fact the opposite is true because "ugly" women and girls are easier targets
you cannot convince me "pretty privelege" is real when this happens everyday. sometimes you really wish you were mid because of the safety boost it provides.
I think what many people fail to grasp is that modern billionaires are 1=1 with the moronic, desperate kings who paid alchemists and magicians fortunes to make them immortal. They believe money grants them magical powers and protects them from any and all consequences.
"One joke stretched until you can hear its joints popping like some poor bastard broken on the rack. "Oh my car has pronouns, I identify as a bird, I'm trans-Chinese." The laziness of it -- shameful. You should see the transgendered roast themselves; there's true scorched earth."
Aimee Terese saying "you will never be a woman" to a picture of HERSELF is like the posting equivalent of a bird flying into a mirror and breaking its neck.
"The Romans had their castrated priestesses, the Hindus their Hijras, but my god, let us take to the barricades because Uncle Al came to Thanksgiving in a skirt and pantyhose! It's the province of rubes. Hayseed reactionaries and the worst effluvia of America's suburban colon."
The experience of being homeschooled is completely encapsulated by the time I went to a book club for homeschooled teens and there was a girl there dressed in a crushed velvet revolutionary war uniform who introduced herself by saying "I fancy myself a bit of a libertine"
"What business is it of mine if a young man requires -- no, I will not play linguistic games with you. I will not engage in sophistry, sir -- requires the services of an abortion doctor? Last I checked it bore no cost in blood for the Bette Midlers of the world!"
The "problematic authors" list was made by a 20-year-old so I'm not going to link it or quote-dunk, but I think it's very telling that she draws no distinction whatsoever between the behavior of the authors and the fictional happenings of their novels.
The essential problem with Whedonesque dialogue is that it has no respect for wonder, terror, or mystery. It's rolling your eyes at the most profound visions of ecstasy and horror the universe has to offer.
Learning that the stupid Harry Potter game was produced by Nazi gamergater Troy Leavitt and includes at least one reference to the 1612 fettmilch pogrom... wow.
"And Chapelle! My god, Chapelle. Embarrassing as only a true great can become in his declining years -- I speak here with complete self-awareness; kindly hold your barbs -- as he tires of innovation and falls back into the soporific cushion of the lowest common denominator!"
"Oh Game of Thrones isn't realistic because the dragons wouldn't really be able to fly" bitch the most popular shows in the world involve cops regularly solving crimes.
The bear that fights Jaime and Brienne on Game of Thrones would only perform if his handlers brought him frying pans full of whipped cream and everyone applauded while he ate them, which is very close to what I want out of life.
Kept hearing someone on this beach shouting "crab master!" until I finally looked up and saw three little boys dropping crabs in a bucket in front of a six-month old before kneeling, bowing, and saying "crab master" reverently
I was held and loved as a child by arms tattooed at Auschwitz, and if I ever hear one word of denialism from anyone they'll be on a scavenger hunt for their teeth for the rest of their life
Twitter is so amazing because the richest, most powerful people in the world who could be doing absolutely anything with their time CANNOT stop logging on and getting kicked in the balls
Brianna Wu's leaked DMs revealing she's a sad, miserable transphobe who hates direct action and has no actual beliefs... who could have seen this coming
insanely baller move for ANDOR to be like "that chick from one scene in ROGUE ONE and a few seconds of RETURN OF THE JEDI? a full quarter of our season is gonna be about her shitty marriage, and it's going to be fucking riveting"
"Characters can't consent to you watching them have sex" yes and my fucking alarm clock can't consent to being set to blare RIDING DIRTY whenever I want it to. That is the nature of the inanimate.
if you experience extreme traumatic distress while reading fiction and cannot restrain yourself from venting those emotions at the fiction's creator, i have bad news for you about who in this scenario is an unsafe person who can't be trusted with grown-up art.
You don't have to cling to opinions you didn't form yourself. You don't have to hate Fight Club or Catcher in the Rye or be scornful about the Beatles. It's insanely boring. I am trying to do you a favor.
"The McElroy brothers? Don't -- my god -- don't trouble me with that. Sexless fraternity dropouts failing their way upward with a string of projects one might charitably describe as a sort of 'Blue's Clues' aimed at a generation of young adults terrified of their own genitalia."
Rowling is remaking her books primarily or solely because so much of the original cast has come out against her gender nazi bullshit. It's a whole fucking exercise in laundering her public reputation, a big bet, and it is not going to fucking work.
The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services is in a full-blown crisis.
Nearly 2,300 employees have quit, many citing Greg Abbott’s politicization of the office such as the investigation of parents of trans kids.
The billionaire Howard Shultz doxxed thousands of Starbucks Workers Union members to right-wing maniacs and bloodthirsty Zionists because one person in the union tweeted "Solidarity with Palestine".
Howard Shultz and Starbucks Corporate team work together with Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce to identify Union owned Stores and take legal action on Its support of Hamas."
…
Never in my life thought I would defend the Dr. Who guy against criticism, but Matt Smith's weird face rules. Being weird-looking is a powerful tool for any actor, and only people who are Marvel-poisoned by movies full of sanded-down catalog models would say otherwise.
RIP Ray Stevenson, whose turn as Titus Pullo on ROME is one of the greatest effortlessly charming performances of TV's golden age. A warm guy, by all accounts, and a serious craftsman. He'll be sorely missed.
Saw the "I thought my partner was about to propose, but instead she came out as a trans woman" piece and all I have to say is that if you can write like that about someone you love, your love is rancid garbage she's better off without.
Cowards. Groveling moral weaklings. Eleven obsessive fascist weirdos are responsible for over 60% of book ban requests, and that was enough to make this company fold up like wet paper.