Friends, it’s time! After years of work, endless revisions, it’s finally done!! If you’re a fan of my writing it would mean so much to me if you checked this out on your podcatcher of choice.
Welcome to the Lees: a jazzy pleasure district where the buildings walk, the party never stops, and the edges of reality are beginning to crack.
Fault & Stitchery follows Festus, a genderqueer tailor and memory mage, as they find themself tangled in wild magic, political unrest, half-truths, and lost memories — all with implications well above their pay grade.
I have been working on this for years, and it’s finally, FINALLY real.
If you’ve ever enjoyed my writing, or are any of the dozens and dozens of people who have sent messages saying “Hey, you should write a book”, HERE IT IS.
The first episode is dropping soon, so please subscribe and get ready to be taken on a journey. This is something special, I can promise you.
Welcome to the Lees: a jazzy pleasure district where the buildings walk, the party never stops, and the edges of reality are beginning to crack. Fault & Stitchery follows Festus, a genderqueer tailor and memory mage, as they find themself tangled in wild magic, political unrest, half-truths, and lost memories — all with implications well above their pay grade.
the pistachio food trend is soooo interesting because it’s like. i’ve been following the californian pistachio water politics for years, as a californian with personal connections to agricultural workers but! basically there’s been a big push in california agriculture over the last decade to pressure farmers to produce pistachios, because iran has dominated the global market in pistachios for decades, and the US government has been trying to weaken iran economically, so they want to make california pistachios a competitor. which is ridiculous, because california’s agricultural infrastructure is suffering under a drought, and pistachios take insane amounts of water. so a ton of water is being redirected from the people in order to engage in a trade war with iran over fucking. pistachios.
anyway now that the US (i.e. california) is producing more pistachios than iran, the next step is to drive consumption of pistachios, so that the farmers who are producing these pistachios can continue to make money on them. ergo all the fancy pistachio coffees at starbucks and similar shit like suddenly being able to find pistachio butter in grocery stores when five years ago it was exclusively available at specialty stores and online, and the huge boom in pistachios foods in instagram and tiktok recipe content. like i watch a lot of instagram foodie reels (cooking/baking is one of my hobbies) and these get thrown onto everyone’s feeds, to promote the purchasing of pistachios, so that the US can stick it to iran. it’s. kind of incredible to watch this happen in real time, because it sounds like deranged conspiracy thought, but like. i’ve been watching this trend for the past decade and it’s fucking real.
anyway one of the vegan recipe accounts i follow just posted like five pistachio-based recipes in a row and it makes me feel some kind of fucking way
it is extremely relevant that pistachios are so easy to acquire here, but acorns, which are an indigenous California food staple crop, are impossible to find even in the best stocked grocery stores, and knowing how to prepare them for consumption is a rarer skill than sourdough starter
This is like the eldritch knowledge of late stage capitalism: being just aware enough of seemingly unrelated facts to know that the world is hurdling towards disaster and war for the stupidest reasons imaginable.
Tradwives (and trads in general really) frequently do this thing where they post images from old advertisements showing happy white, extremely gender-conforming and heterosexual couples and do the whole “see how much better things were back in the Good Old Days” thing (without even acknowledging stuff like segregation or marital rape laws) and like…
Please be serious. You are basing your image of the past on marketing campaigns instead of reading any real history. You might as well be basing your political views on fantasy books. In fact, that might at least be more emotionally sincere than an ad.
Also, advertisements showing happy people enjoying various products still exist. They say as much about the state of society in general as they ever did.
The funny thing is, they really do base their political views on fantasy books, or more specifically, movies, because these are not the sort of people who read. When the alt-right talk about how badass the spartans were and how we need to toughen up today’s youth, they’re not actually talking about history, they’re talking about the movie 300 and how it made them vicariously feel like manly men defending civilization against degenerate brown people.
Look at all the weird RETVRN people and their millennia displaced nostalgia for the roman empire, or the fact that Alex Jones, one of the biggest right wing ideologues ATM has a view of how souls work that’s fundamentally a bastardized version of Dune.
These things make the Trads feel good about themselves, and anything that makes them feel good MUST be true.
The meme is “you are not immune to propaganda” but the trads don’t WANT to be immune, they want to propagandized to and have someone project an idealized self image that they can vicariously live through. It doesn’t mater whether it’s an old cigarette commercial or Triumph of the Will.
i think control also imo loses something of the fun of the SCP foundation or even other inspired porperties like LobCorp in that it fits everything into one cohesive overarchign system which is ultimately irtself just not that interesting. a little more variety and mystery in the things the bureau deals with would be nice but instead it’s all just Magic Items adn Evil Magic Items which fundamentally all work the same
a lot of the fun of SCP stuff or LobCorp or thje Cabin in the Woods cube sequence or fuck, even something like inside job which all arguably play in a similar space is that you have all these bizarre little side-narratives, right, like “in this box we have the last relic of an ancient civilization that summons a rain of lizards. and here we have the roswell aliens. and in this box we have Bigfoot.” and i think control kind of fundamentally lacks that, its world ends up feeling small to me because of how much all ties back to the same underlying metaphysical and mechanical framework
Control is really moreso a single SCP than an attempt to recreate the entire Foundationverse. The Oldest House could certainly qualify as a large and important entry, you know, one of the entries that end in -000, but you’re quite right in that it feels like it’s all operating within a single model. We never shift Genre or Tone. The 4th wall remains largely intact
To use in-universe terms, Control’s Hume Space is smooth and continuous: there’s only one set of supernatural axioms. There is only one Narrator, so to speak.
While I was initially a bit disappointed by how unwierd control ended up being the FBC is far more interesting when you consider it a part of the Alan Wake “metafiction” universe, IE as something that exists because someone up the chain wrote it into existence.
On some level, the FBC exists because the writer Alan Wake used the powers of his “anything I create comes true and then goes wrong” curse to create something (or someone) that could potentially save him. Everything from the extradimensional office building to the killer fridge to the janitor who’s likely the Finnish god of the sea is potentially either his own creation or something else in the cosmos that swept up when the curse reformatted the universe to make his fiction “come true”.
What I find fascinating about the FBC is that they’re not the SCP foundation: They’re an organization that realized that LARPing as the SCP foundation gave them a very literal air of authority to the point where so long as they pretend they’re a part of the US government they’ll be treated as such. They live in a world where ideas can become true, to the point where them studying the paranomal has changed how the paranormal works several times.
Mohg is the most problematic queer rep of all time. He rules. Yeah he has magic AIDS that works especially well against Christians. He captured and intends to marry an eternal-child god, not for pedophilia reasons, but because he wants to commit genocide. Presumably to replace the christians with his magic AIDS blood cult.
The drip! The presentation! The fact that his horns are so overgrown that he’s giving himself a partial lobotomy!
This is where I put all my fandom conent, dungeons and dragons thoughts, and meta-musing. If you're interested in some homebrew content, check out my sideblog: dailyadventuremprompts.tumblr.com
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