I See A World Of Light

my comic for the fairy anthology we made over in webcomics garden discord! Wretched work to make a comic that's only 8 pages..

My favorite leverage bit is when they have agreed on names for cons that they never explain but reference absolutely bonkers bits of. Like. “Yeah I was running a Blue Spiked Fish but then I lost the wig and had to turn it into a Seventh Taco on the fly.” “Where on earth did you get the firefighter uniform??” “Had one in the closet from running a Cicada job earlier that year.” Beautiful. Perfect. They could do this every episode.

Nate: “We’re going with a much bigger scam. One of the classics.”

Parker: “The London Spank?”

Hardison: “The Genevan Paso Doble?”

Eliot: “The Apple Pie.” (everyone stares at him blankly) “It’s like the Cherry Pie, but with lifeguards.”

I found the list I kept of all of them

The Spanish Prisoner The London Spank The Genevan Paso Doble The Apple Pie… it’s like the Cherry Pie but with lifeguards Glengarry Glen Death The Turnabout (2 badges, 1 sheepdog, 1 ice queen, 1 bag man) Cafe and a Moonlit Terrace The Mona Lisa Variant The Swedish Rail Con The Cairo Flier (“no way, I’m not wearing that dress again”) Fiddle Game The Berlin Shuffle Little Orphan Annie Skagway Shuffle (like the fiddle game but underground) The Mummy’s Tiara The Vegas Wake Up Call The Cuban Sandwich The Spanish Turnabout The Edwin Garvey The Peking Watch Con Moscow Circus (“I’m running the Moscow Circus and you’re the Ivan”) The Romanian Circus (& variant, the Snipe Hunt) Roman Wedding (abbreviated version) Peruvian Slide (you need two old people and a banana peel) Boca Backlash (a roper with a glass eye) (it’s not a glass eye, it’s a cue ball!) Oklahoma Little Chucky (rottweiler and some fireworks) The Chilean Custard The Big Store The Lazy Dugson The Pizzero Pressure Point The White Van Speakers The High Minnie/Mini (?)

The people who'll go "ugh that's not what ketamine does, you people have clearly never done drugs" obviously were not there when "cast ketamine ape" was added to the list of banned spells. Because clearly you've got the wrong idea of what "cast ketamine ape" actually does.

First of all, did you know that as far as magic is concerned, it can't tell the difference between being poisoned unintentionally, being poisoned intentionally, and being intoxicated recreationally. You can straight-up fucking narcan someone with any healing spell that includes removing poison from the body. And the fun part is, they come out in full fight-or-flight. Yeah they come up swinging. Also even if your healing spells are specifically tailored to be used on humans, and are unreliable even on most other mammals, primates are so close to humans in structure that specifically human-intended spells work on them just fine.

Now picture the following: You've got a full-grown adult male cape babboon, already deep in a k-hole, somewhat conscious but with no inkling of where, how, what, or why it is, lightly concealed within some sort of material that it could easily rip through if it was in its full strength. Let's say, gently wrapped in newspaper.

Now let's say you stealthily leave a mysteriously wrapped bundle - almost the right size to contain a human child but certainly the wrong shape for that - in an inconspicuous place. Like under one of the tables at a wizard conference. Maybe under the table of someone important that you don't like. Then, at a safe distance but within reach of the magic, you cast "poison heal".

And obviously, they couldn't just ban "poison heal".

My attempts to popularize "salt gliders" and "butter gliders" as household pets will not be deterred by the nonexistence of these animals.

i love this guy

We were doing an activity where the kids got to make a playbill for a musical about themselves and all the other kids were like “character list: mommy, daddy, me, my brother, my best friend” “scenes: I get a puppy, first day of school, my baby sister is born”

But one little girl was like “oh, it’s a musical about ME you say” and the character list was all the other girls in the class cast as her body parts, and a story about how her body works.

“Kaylee is nice so she will be the heart. Lily is my kidneys. Sapphire is the lungs.”

She surreptitiously showed me that the girl who kept taking the crayons she was using was cast specifically as “left buttcheek” and I had to pretend like that wasn’t the funniest thing I’d ever seen.

updated the character limit on the blinkie maker! previously 15 characters, you can now attempt to cram a whopping 25 characters on your blinkies!! certain fonts and font sizes WILL cut off. use your best judgement ok?

perfect

Sometimes I think about how so much of what makes Murderbot who it is comes down to it being a rental SecUnit. When Leonide tells Arada in Network Effect that Company Units have a reputation for being dangerous, she's probably 100% correct. Because of their nature as plug-and-play security for anyone, they have to be designed to be far more versatile than the SecUnits a corporate like BE owns. Three has to be able to secure salvage operations and mining outposts and work with BE's systems and that's kind of it. BE might need its security to fend off hostile takeovers and workplace uprisings, but Murderbot has to be able to do all those things and planetary surveys with unknown hostile fauna, and asteroid mining belts, and whatever the next client might need it to do, and it has to be able to work with whatever other proprietary software the new clients have every single time. It's better at adapting to new situations than Three partly because it's older and more experienced, but also because that's a big part of its function.

And at the same time, Company SecUnits are treated much worse than Three by virtue of being rentals. Many--if not most--of Murderbot's clients didn't want to have any SecUnits, but were required to take them per Company rental agreements for other equipment. Even the ones who specifically did want SecUnits didn't have any investment in what happened to them. They were the equivalents of the U-haul you'd rent to move your couch across town. They just needed to do a job briefly and hopefully be in good enough shape to get their deposit back at the end, but if not, eh. No big deal. Murderbot has never had the same clients for very long, and it's never had to work with the same SecUnits for very long. Every contract changes. Nothing lasts.

No wonder MB loves fiction while Three loves nonfiction. Three has seen basically nothing about reality outside of its job and wants to know what's out there. MB has seen way too much reality and would like some breaks from that shit now, please.

Op why did you sentence this comedy gold to the tags

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!

I used to set this one for second year undergraduate creative writing seminars on writing science fiction on a double bill with Octavia E. Butler's "Bloodchild" and no-one here gets out alive.

all all all

I’ve been trying to put my finger on why Hades being depicted as a villain is so annoying in other media but works so well in Hadestown, and I think I’ve figured out why: Hadestown Hades isn’t the bad guy because he’s the god of the DEAD; instead, he’s the bad guy because he’s the god of WEALTH. Usually, whenever Hades appears in a movie or video game, he has some stupid motivation like “ughh I’m tired of being lord of the underworld I wanna be lord of everything” or “I’m the Greek mythology version of the western concept of Satan, fear me!!” but Hadestown really said screw that and made his motivation “I love my wife so much but we have a shitty marriage arrangement and her long absence combined with my severe self-doubt has lead me down the hellish road to corruption by all the riches under the ground.”

#okay but you could argue! that in hadestown specifically#hades being the god of wealth and the god of death are both part of him being a capitalist#unsafe practices and hazardous materials kill or disable a LOT of construction workers#labour laws are written in blood#and it’s impossible to get filthy rich like that without exploiting other human beings

Sorry @exeiguess but your tags passed peer review. This is it exactly. The two are intertwined especially when it comes to discussions of labor and worker’s rights and exploitation, and THAT’S part of what makes him work so perfectly as the antagonist in Hadestown.

If I were a murderer, and I'd meticulously planned a murder, and then I turned up at the place to do the murder and found that world-famous-murder-solver Hercule Poirot was also there, I would simply not do the murder.

Okay but teacher Grace on Erid having very little say in which kids get filtered into his class, though he is aware that the selection process is super specific and that most of the kids he gets are high performers with star academics and some even with influential parents. He isn't quite comfortable enough with Eridian culture yet to object to the selection process and make it more inclusive, however. That is, until he learns about the special needs kids.

Obviously, there are Eridian kids with special needs, and a few of them even filter into his classes. But one specific type of special needs kid has never shown up in his classes, and the only reason he even learned of the condition is because Rocky and Adrien's first pebble has the condition.

It's initially quite a struggle for them to deal with, and Grace sympathizes of course, because the child will apparently have huge learning and academic struggles and will likely never be able to live on their own. That is, until he learns the details of the disability.

Basically, it's a condition where the part of the Eridian brain that gives them their eidetic memory isn't fully developed, and so these kids just... can't remember things the way most eridians do. And in a culture where an eidetic memory is the norm, all things cater to that, so not having that is actually a massive disability.

But Grace is like, so... this kid just learns the same way a human does, or something like. Which is nothing new to him, though he is somewhat boggled at how much Rocky and Adrian struggle with their infant and their "slow" learning curve, even as far as initial developmental stages. Grace, on the other hand, simply treats the kid the same way he would a human infant, and Rocky and Adrien are impressed with his patience.

But, through this, it occurs to Grace that there must be other kids out there with this disability who likely aren't getting the attention and chances in life that they deserve, because Eridian culture is particularly hostile toward this disability, and actively views those with it as unable to function in regular society.

So Grace demands that a special course be put together where he teaches kids with this disability specifically. Rocky is hesitant, as most kids with this disability are home schooled and kind of... kept shut away. But Grace insists and as one of Erid's saviors, he gets what he wants eventually.

His first class is super small, maybe only three kids because so few parents were willing to advertise that their children have this disability. And because of the stigma around it, even those who agreed to it are super unsure and want to be present during the lessons, perhaps paranoid about the impression it will leave on Savior Grace, who is so accustomed to only teaching the most gifted students.

But Grace knows exactly how to deal with these kids. Some of them have varying degrees of function when it comes to their memory banks, which isn't so unlike teaching kids on earth. And so Grace is able to introduce all these tools and teaching techniques that were previously unheard of on Erid (though very normal on Earth) like having textbooks for reference with you at all times and having strategies that are less focused on memorization for understanding, and providing these kids with tools like calculators and teaching them the art of taking notes to look back on, etc etc.

Suddenly, with all these tools that most Eridians don't need, these kids are learning at a much faster rate, and succeeding with the help of all their little tools. And because so many normal eridians are ignorant of Grace's actual biology, it's shocking to them that Savior Grace doesn't have an eidetic memory either (shocking to everyone but Rocky anyway)--that his brain functions quite similarly in capacity to these "disabled" children.

Once this news gets around, suddenly there's more kids in his special classes, and there's all kinds of discourse being inflamed because the real reason these kids can't live on their own or function is lack of support from Eridian society.

If Savior Grace, who is well respected as a genius in his own right amongst the Eridians, can function so successfully, they why can't these kids?

I dunno, I just think it's an interesting premise.

Okay, but, the little Eridians that attend Grace's special courses will have to bring way more supplies with them than would be usual.

Little baby Eridians with little baby backpacks, is what I'm getting at here.

I did not expect this to be the most popular post I ever made.

If it gets 50,000 likes, I'll write a fic. Let's see what happens.

If alcohol can shorten your memory imagine what alcohol can do