Enki

as soon as i figure out whether there’s any practical difference between ‘that’ and ‘which’ in a sentence, you’re all finished

we all know there should have been a real hug in the finale (thanks @cryran88 for the inspo!)

just a little Funger comic. cahara and d'arce briefly discuss their special someones.

p.s. help me get to grad school: https://ko-fi.com/sunnyshea

I went to a library book sale this weekend and I found a very old book called “Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers,” which was published in I think 1975? I’ve been reading it kind of like how I would read a historical document, and it’s lowkey fascinating

I was part of the staff of an anime convention all the way through college. We held our meetings on monday nights, and every monday after the meeting, most of us went to taco bell. We would get our terrible garbage food and sit at the tables and hang out until the wee hours of the morning, and sometimes Pat Rothfuss (who lived nearby) would drop by and blow our little nerdy brains. It was a beloved tradition. 

One of our staffers was referred to as the Dapper Man, because he could frequently be found wearing a three-piece suit as he went about his daily business. A button-down and waistcoat was his casual attire, and on truly formal occasions, he would produce a tailcoat, tophat, and monocle. Somehow this worked incredibly well for him. Dapper Man was much lauded for his sartorial choices.

When Halloween rolled around, we held our meeting as usual, but with the addition of a bit of ridiculous cosplay holiday-garb. Since Halloween was not actually on a monday, only a few people were in costume. Dapper Man was.

These were the days before the rubber horse mask phenomenon went mainstream. They had just started to be available. Until Dapper Man arrived as a Formal Thoroughbred, I had never seen one. 

He was quite dashing, though, with white gloves, a black tailcoat, and a monocle on his wide, staring, rubber horse-eyes. There was a strange but alarming dignity to the look. 

We made it through the meeting with the usual chaos expected of ninety nerds left unsupervised with a twenty-thousand dollar budget, and progressed posthaste to TBell.

The local taco bell had a real problem with keeping staff on–for some reason, drug use was prolific among their employees, and they struggled to find consistent workers. But they knew we would be there every monday, and even though we were a big group we were patent and polite, and they generally liked us. So we rolled into taco bell with our usual aplomb. 

We straggled into line and started placing orders, and I watched idly as the employee in back began assembling “tacos.” He was visibly blitzed; if he’d been any higher he might have floated off entirely. 

He stuck his gloved hand into the tub of shredded lettuce, drew out a handful, looked up and caught sight of Dapper Man: the Equine Gentleman. 

He did a double-take and then froze entirely. 

You could see the whites of his eyes all the way around. It was very clear that he had absolutely no ability to comprehend what he was seeing; probably he assumed some sort of genteel victorian old god had come to wreak hoofed vengeance upon his taco-y demesne. Possibly he was just grappling with the possibility of reverse centaurs. 

Either way, he had become a lettuce-bearing statue. 

Taco production ground to a halt.  He stood, trapped by the medusan gaze of Dapper Man’s rubber horse mask, until his manager came to yell at him. 

At that point he dropped the lettuce and fled the taco bell. 

I can only assume he could hear the sound of dress-shoe shod hoofbeats thundering behind him. 

For all I know, he may still be fleeing Dapper Man’s dread fursona. We never saw him at the taco bell again. 

Fear and slumber!

Available here

Fear and Hunger arts that i didnt post on here yet

Enki S Ending: God Blocking Gambit

you found out today that a phrase you have used before was coined by an abusive man. this felt like getting your teeth taken out. it made you sick and sad and tired, but not surprised.

bad people tell you to be careful when you talk badly of bad men, that it could "ruin" a life. you had your life ruined by a bad man, not that it ever matters to them. your real life having real consequences is not valued as highly as the potential of his future.

this has always been a frustrating little mathematics problem for you. you've missed school and had to call out sick at work and had panic attacks that lasted for weeks. it stole sleep and food and friends from you. you cried in public, fucked your relationships up. and the whole time: your present has never mattered so much as the great what if! of his future. like - one life (your life) is already ruined, should we really ruin two?

so you live with the consequences and he doesn't, and that's just like, something you need therapy for. you once discussed this with one of your friends over coffee. she chewed the wooden stirrer, looked off into the distance. "once i became a victim, everything that happens to me afterward is automatically less interesting in the eyes of the general public. it is always about him. he changed my identity. to survivor. to statistic. meanwhile this whole time - i am a person."

you learned in college that three out of five of your favorite artists and authors were actually abusive assholes. these days, you are no longer surprised. oh, is that what was happening behind closed doors? of course it was, he was a "genius," and she was just a girl. you are talking about him in art history, so obviously his career was absolutely ruined, for eternity. that's what happens, right? they strike your name from the record and refuse to remember you? nobody really knows her name, but hey. that's what you get for being close to celebrity.

you got into an argument about it, which was a bad argument, because it made you cry. he said what, you want us to just ignore all the things this man did because he made a few women uncomfortable? and you'd balled your fists up and choked on it. later, in bed, you agonized over the response you'd been trying to articulate but never found the right moment to deploy: you are ignoring what any person could do if they weren't being fucking abused. maybe her talents far exceeded his and she was just never allowed to fucking use them. maybe we only see genius in white men because they purposefully fucking squash and silence any other people with talent.

but you'd cried about it instead of saying that, because you are the cost. you are the talent and potential that he took. you used to be brave and smart and clever and unafraid. like a lich, he stole years of your life.

quiet on set made you sad and sick and tired, but not surprised. unfortunately, one of the things he said was true: an entire network of people allowed it to continue. this is not news to you, because you have seen entire networks of people make the same fucking excuses when the same thing or-worse happened to you. and your particular story isn't even in hollywood. it was just a guy. it was still difficult getting people to stand up for you.

you and your friend wait in line for your coffee. like a standup joke, one man turns to the other and says "can't wait for every bitch to come crawling out of the woodwork complaining about harassment. it's another metoo." and you think - oh, that's the network. your boss tucks her hair back and whispers that while your skirt is cute, you're giving the boys the wrong idea. that's the network. when you'd told your "friend" about what happened, she'd said oh you must have misunderstood, that would never happen. and that's the network.

you woke up this morning panting, because years later you still have panic attacks. oh, it's not a network, actually, it's a web. and you, little moth: are you still surprised you're caught in it?