Kathy > Recent Status Updates

a silly little romp so far!

if I hadn’t just read the Grapes of Wrath and This Has Always Been A War, I don’t think I would viscerally understand the plight of Latin American agricultural workers as described in this.

“Is it hard, jailbreaking?”

A ship was a computer that you put desperate people inside, and when the computer went bad, the ship was a tomb you put desperate people inside.

This was a new kind of toaster, a toaster that took orders, rather than giving them. A toaster that would let her toast anything she wanted to toast: unauthorized bread. Even homemade bread. Homemade bread was something she’d read about in books, seen in old dramas, but she didn’t know anyone who actually baked bread. That was like gnawing your own furniture out of whole logs or something.

“More and more things keep happening, a real deluge of events, more than I am capable of collecting: I pull out the hem of my uniform and my cupped hands to try to catch it all, but buckets wash past me, and only small drops land on these pages…” (me journaling in 2025-26)

“if she names me in there, in the Operating Room—so be it: I will feel grateful to spend my final moments reverently kissing the punishing hand of the Benefactor. As a citizen of the One State, I have the right to receive punishment, and I refuse to give up that right. No citizen should ever attempt to refuse this one and only—and therefore, all the more precious—right—and none ever dares to." ok bootlicker

men love to write fucked up dystopias where the male main character comes to his senses/goes insane because of a beautiful one dimensional manic pixie dream girl

Currently reading the titular short story from “Unauthorized Bread”: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/0...

Author has a bizarre combination perspectives. He has compassion for the exterminated, enslaved, and oppressed Indigenous peoples of Latin America and tells their story; he also frequently refers to not-yet-exploited deep Amazonia/montane tribes as “barbarous”, “savage”, and having “no organized civilization”.

“While metals flowed unceasingly from Latin American mines, equally unceasing were the orders from the Spanish Court granting paper protection and dignity to the Indians whose killing labor sustained the kingdom. The fiction of legality protected the Indian; the reality of exploitation drained the blood from his body.”

“The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of [malnutrition] must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. […] In the eyes of the people there is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

“No—the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds. And everything’s holy—everything, even me.”

“… The great owners, who had become through their holdings both more and less than men, ran to their destruction, and used every means that in the long run would destroy them. Every little means, every violence, every raid on a[n itinerant worker camp], every deputy swaggering through a ragged camp, put off the day a little and cemented the inevitability of the day.”

two opening sentences: “The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing. Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations.”

this is a trauma memoir. It needs so many content warnings.

“I was so lucky, through all this, to have been blessed with so many good friends who loved me and stood with me through so much, even when I did not deserve it. I was not a good friend at that time, selfish and needy. … I would like to write that it was this great love that saved me, but that’s not true. In the hour you are most alone, all the love in the world is not enough.”

“Where are we in your dystopia?” is OBNOXIOUS. The author just isn’t well read enough and treats it as if the authors she wants to read don’t exist. THEY DO. “Margaret Atwood is the mother of feminist dystopia spec fic and the genre isn’t brown enough” HELLO HAVE YOU HEARD OF OCTAVIA BUTLER?