Stoppard, Z”l!

Et, in Arcadia:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it...

I do also think it’s really useful for defamiliarizing gender — everyone thinks they know what a man is, but every writer has to establish for themselves what it means to be an alpha, and doing that points very directly to the way gender is constructed.

I think there’s an element to it too of like… omegaverse is a near-parody of a heterosexuality the culture promises us, and sometimes making that m/f is just buying into that more, but sometimes it’s admitting that that promised heterosexuality is as fictional as magic wolf dicks.

Making it impossible for an author to sell their next book doesn’t just kill that book. It makes it far less likely the author will continue writing at all. They have to make a living somehow and they were already earning pennies an hour for their bonkers fragile and emotionally demanding work.

Their love seems like a powerful adhesive and I am glad you have it going for you.

Congratulations to your loafs on remaining adorable!

brain-boiling from lockdown and such is absolutely part of it but I'm mostly referring to the sheer weight of unprocessed grief bsky.app/profile/docs...

Baum’s politics are amiable and incoherent and would fit right in at basically any town hall meeting in the US.