itch.io

So imagine you're a hero of legend. A Beowulf or King Arthur or Hercules  or Cu Cullain type. Imagine dying to a literal insect. Not a swarm of eusocial insects like wasps or ants. That might not be so surprising to an entomologist. Nor would it surprise you to learn that one of those had died to a scorpion or even a spider. Those little guys pack some serious punch in the venom department. No, imagine your great legendary hero dying to a headlouse. Something you'd use an acidy shampoo to melt alive and not think twice about. Something that in previous centuries you just ignored because they're headlice, they're not that big of a deal! Imagine mother fucking Hercules being merced by a headlouse!

I can't explain what this is in reference to because spoiler alert but imagine a legendary and undying hero being literally killed by a headlouse. Imagine what the people who spoke his name with reverence might think. Imagine how they might react to hearing from a seer that they are destined to die by the hand of a headlouse. Imagine what their final thoughts must have been: Did I really just get killed by a headlouse? I! Hercules‽ NAY! Impossible!

I'm still laughing imagining it

1. Autistic rep! Lets goooooooooooo!
2. Franchesca is a carcrash of a character. Like she's not uncompelling but she causes literally every problem in the story with a different personality flaw and Ignacio is a saint for putting up with her bullshit
3. Keep Franchesca away from anyone who saw Mother Gothel in tangled and thought "I can fix her" because she kinda has that energy

I think I might have spent more time trying to make it work with my ebook than actually reading it. Which is hilarious because the word count isn't crazy and I'm pretty sure the formatting was basically vanilla from the title onwards. (I don't know how libreoffice writer works. Wouldn't know how word works either. I'm sure someone who knows what they were doing or who isn't overthinking it could have a working EPUB in 30 seconds)

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN'T GO TO MY OWN DAUGHTER'S WEDDING?" -> "Sorry Lord Vistel, Princess's orders"

"Princess, please explain to me why I'm not invited to my own daughter's wedding" -> "Because I want my honeymoon to be freaky and I don't want you making it weird"

Brought to you by incorrectquotes

Also there's a song called Sofia by Alvaro Soler and it slaps

"You don't ask yourself whether you're right or left-handed do you?" - Gurl you don't know what you're playing with with that sentence. I write with my right hand but tend to favor my left in certain situations. For example when I used to wear a watch I wore it on my right wrist where most righthanded folk wear them on their left. To say nothing of my concious efforts to become ambidexterous. My relationship to hand dominence might actually be more complicated than my relationship to gender!

You have no idea how computers work, do you? I mean I know most girls who pine after flesh and blood girls aren't neurobiologists but… OMG that's adorable

Words cannot express how much I appreciate the pacing on this. I would not have the discipline, patience or raw spine required to write a character who feels so trapped for so long. So many transfem characters start the story on the cusp of realization and then get magic girl powers under 5% into the story. This... it's like the miracle candle that burns for 7 nights when the only light you've ever known is fireworks. A more subtle light, but all the more beautiful for it's patience

People really need to stop writing James Jonah Jameson like he's the host of infowars. The daily Bugle is a respected newspaper. The reason Jameson is scary is because he has a legitimate platform. He's not some qanon lunatic screaming about homosexual amphibians. He's a respected journalist. Your grandmother reads the Bugle and if Parker ever for an instant slips up, Everything Jameson has ever said about him will become the defacto public opinion.

Jonesifying Jameson is to downplay the terror of having a newspaper that your parents might read and trust that has decided that you are its personal bitch eating crackers in circulation. Its pretending that malevolant liars are only weirdos on the internet and that a legitimate paper like (oh, lets just say the Sun, not that I have any particular bias against that gossip rag) would never stoop so low.

JJJ isn't Alex Jones, he's Rupert Murdock. Sure, the former is a stocastic terrorist who harasses the parents of school shooting victims. But the latter you might not even have heard of. The latter is responsible for shifting blame away from the police after the Liverpool crowd crush. Jones would sell his soul to Satan for that kind of influence. JJJ isn't some lunatic straight out of a cartoon. He's a diabolically intelligent propagandist who can nudge public opinion while hiding behind an illusion of "innocent" centrism

You could make a genuinely terrifying transphobe of James Jonah Jameson. But having him hock vitamins and transvestigate people is not how you do that. Jameson is not a joke, he's a dangerous antagonist that spiderman has no way of fighting save for proving him wrong every day by not being the monster Jameson thinks he is.

Disney was at best fucking stupid if not actually malicious for doing this to him in No Way Home. (Gee, I wonder how a multi billion dollar media corporation benefits from the idea of "you can always tell if someone is a quack journalist")
 

"You're the egg boy." -> Well that got a spit take out of me. Hats off cap'n

Glad to see people are still making games for a 35 year old console

Some things that involuntarily came out of my mouth while reading this:

"Doof and Perry aren't this gay!"
"He knows. He fucking has to know"
"I thought you had to be a lesbian to be this useless"
"Wait, he seriously didn't know?"
"Saaaaaaaaaaaaame girl, saaaaaaaaame…"
"Based"

As someone who knows tech but not security tech, all the hacking seems pretty true to life. The one exception was not indexing the financial records. You know its actually pretty easy to write an ETL script to convert data from whatever wonky format to an sqlite/mysql/mongodb database, all of which allow you to search through the data with a mind boggling list of potential aggregations. You don't need to write a custom solution, you just need to convert your data to something you're familiar with.

Also Janus and their leaving their back doors open expecting Sue to snoop instead of just… telling her is very hilariously relatable

"Amazing what you can do with a city when an automobile industry isn't lobbying leaders to ruin every square inch" - Based

So um… I knew a girl called Aisling once, and I'm pretty sure we've all seen death note. A trans story giving the dragons names that don't match their pronouns. I'm not sure if its deliberate or just a hilarious coincidence.

Did you watch miraculous ladybug and go "this love tetradon is too simple and boring, hold my beer"? This is the worst rom-com I've ever read (in the best possible way). I want a movie out of it starring Kristin Steward as Matt/Cassy, Jack Black as Joe and Lady Gaga as Annie