when you see a Good post, you can say "HEEHO" when the post is Bad, the post is "wawoo"

Wawoo

shut the fuck up 

Xenogenesis/Lilith’s brood is a cycle of desperately needing human companionship while simultaneously fearing and hating ourselves and wanting to push away.

You keep wanting the aliens in this book to be entirely malicious or misunderstood based on how sympathetic you are to humans at the time but the aliens in the end of the day do a lot of the same awful things humans do just with a calm passive demeanour.

Ooloi will be like, "Sure, I'll heal your genetic disease, if you just hang out with me during the period of time where my alien body undergoes physical changes until it reaches sexual maturity. Whaaat? You feel biochemically bound to me in a way you can't overcome? That's crazy..."

Thinking about the choice of Butler's Xenogenesis series. You can have kids, and they will be better than you, but you will not recognize them, you will never understand them. You can have a lover who will touch you and know you in perfect pleasure, but it will make regular human touch repulsive in comparison.

You can finally shed the imperfections of humanity, but it is not without cost. In order to rid humanity of the things that destroy it, you also have to give up the things that kept it going.

You are on earth but everyone is preparing to leave. You saved your species but only by becoming absorbed. Truly, you can never go home again.

Lilith to Nikanj

Having a hard time articulating this. But I think one of the reasons I love Octavia Butler's work so much is that, as much as her work is about systems of power, she first empowers her protagonists before she disempowers them. She let's the reader be freed from seeing most realistic depictions of abuse, and then sets up a fantastical form of power to explore the themes in. This makes her books simultaneously disturbing and empowering.

Thinking specifically about Wild Seed and Dawn. Lilith has protection from physical and sexual assault. Cool! Now to deal with an alien race that has a complex plan to coerce humans into breeding with them. Anyanwu is powerful enough that no mortal man can harm her. Cool! Now here is an immortal man that can track her wherever she is.

Class assignment to create a representation of the Oankali aliens from Octavia Butler's Dawn. It's a very interesting book, I'd recommend it.

Just One More Page Challenge Day 17: Most Relatable Character

While there are probably other characters I relate to more in terms of experience/mental health; I LOVE Lilith from the Xenogenesis Trilogy.

One of the biggest challenges in science fiction/fantasy writing is making a character feel like an ordinary person. It can be easy to make your main character just an action-figure who does whatever the plot requires.

Octavia Butler, no surprise given how talented she is, avoids this problem completely. Lilith is such a well-done character, she absolutely feels like an ordinary woman responding to her extraordinary circumstances. Hence, this selection!

i’ve been crying laughing at this all morning it’s so real

Official California Post

Kabru finding some incredible gossip for his Laios callout post

I don’t know what I’m trying to achieve with this background tho

biden's desperation in banning tiktok makes the entire thing more concerning to me than if it were something on the backburner everyone knew would never go anywhere.

he tied it with aid to israel to guarantee the bill made it through the senate. amidst all that is happening, banning fucking tiktok is a serious priority to him, which makes me inclined to believe there's a lot worse coming regarding censorship than currently known to the public--the bill before this one would've allowed the US government to ban social media with no other reason than "we think it's connected to xyz", no evidence presented. it wasn't exclusive to china either, it involved every US adversary, a list of countries which could be expanded whenever the government wanted. the bill failed to pass but it was backed by many including biden.

"Safe Abortion for All.

No Compromise - No Apology"

Print by Bum Lung Press

it seems like no one wants to get hunted for sport these days