The Desert Mermaid

Chugging along!

Prologue and index here!

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It feels a little weird to add a ✨Paypal link, ✨ but hey, writing is hard, so if you want to tip me, I wouldn't say no!

CW for a depressive episode, a repressive dad, and the words "suicidal ideation." Also a slightly nonconsensual bath; I know someone on Twitter found that sort of thing upsetting. It's more of a surprise bath, but yeah.

• I feel as though we're going to have to have a cultural conversation about robots as stand-ins for people in fiction, because I've been hearing people being concerned about robot stories being "pro AI" when the robots are clearly not written as the dumb computer tool AI actually is. Come on, dudes. We anthropomorphize everything. Doesn't mean we're pro-technocrat.

• As somebody who can happily live in a story for months or years at a time, I absolutely do not get people who "already saw it once" and then never want to watch a thing again. In that sense, I guess I'm Jonathan Sims' Wario.

• Sometimes when you're trying to discipline your kid, he drops a total shocker about alternate endings to the cool movie you enjoyed, and you have to tear yourself away from that rabbit hole and try to focus on discipline. Parenting is hard.

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"I don't want to tell you how to do your job," Thoren said to Dexer, "But do you think Lone Light Distribution could get some new stuff in? I'm dying to see Ugly Blood, and I don't think the Board's gonna approve of it."

"We'll take your suggestion under advisement," Dexer said, zeir voice pitched to a perfect customer-service drone, spitting out the disc Thoren had rented. "But we are experiencing a slight technical issue, which has slowed distribution."

"You gotta get going," Jod complained, looking over the menu. "I've seen all of these before."

"You don't like repeat viewings?" I asked, though I knew the answer.

"Why would I watch something again?"

Finally caved in to Netflix's insistence and watched Hemlock Grove. Turns out I'm glad I did because HOLY SHIT y'all this show is fucking BONKERS.

It's hard to decide which thing is more entertaining--is it the crazy special-effects eyeballs-falling-out gloopiness of the transformation into a werewolf? Is it the inexplicable 8-foot-tall glow-in-the-dark one-bug-eyed Frankenstein's monster girl with a heart of gold, keen intellect, and anachronistic vocabulary? Is it Famke Janssen auditioning for Bad English Accent Theater's version of Morticia Addams? Is it the mad scientist with inexplicable super strength? Is it the symbolism that's about as subtle as a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel? Or is it the way everyone pronounces "vargulf" like "Wahrwilf"?

Okay, yeah, it's definitely that last one.

Seriously, this show. I am DYING to see what they do next season.

Okay, y'all, the Rifftrax for Breaking Dawn Part 2 is a goddamn MASTERPIECE. I may have to turn around and watch it again, because it had me doubled over laughing so hard.

Also, Dear Michael Sheen: I WILL BE YOUR FRIEND. Come find me and we will have sparkly shenanigans together. Wear your silly old-timey battle gear. Maybe we can go find nobleplatypus and go to Disneyland! IT WILL BE REMAAAARKABLE

Oh, yeah, I can totally see why they had to split a story as epic as Twilight: Breaking Dawn into two movies. It definitely money needs all that money time to properly money tell the story.

And the part I was looking forward to the most as a certified antifan was not nearly insane enough. Though I suppose it’d still be extra insane for anyone who didn’t read the books, because the movie didn’t stop to explain just why the vampire-gnaws-a-C-section-through-his-beloved bit was necessary. Your story may be stupid, but that is no excuse for sloppy storytelling!

The Rifftrax was darn good, though. The Wahrwilf reference alone made it worthwhile, but I admit I was rather gratified when they cheered the brief appearance of Count Fabulous at the end. Like me, they know who the real star of this story is. We can only hope he steals the hell out of the spotlight in the next one.

Merry Xmas, amigos! Around here the X stands for whatever you want it to. Although it does look rather a lot like Christmas over at the Treehouse.

But what’s this? A new doll? Why, yes! I actually got her for my birthday, but I had some putting together to do before I introduced her.

But you don’t get her full background from a silly Xmas album. So. Let me tell you about Rocket.



( Okay, okay, I’ll cut her background. )

Anyway, tl;dr: I’m having a lot of fun coming up with Space stuff for her. I’m all over shiny space clothes, space robots (I couldn’t resist tiny Tom Servo even though he's not "canon"), space guns, space computers, and other such space necessities. She’s even got a jumpsuit in the works. Because god dammit, this is Raygun Gothic Retro Rocket, and I will do it right.

What I Learned Since The Summer Solstice:

• The favorite architect I never knew I had is the awesomely named Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser. This is what the buildings inside my head look like.
• So one of the latest theories on the proliferation of autoimmune disorders is that in a sanitary ablutomaniacal society, there are not enough germs to keep our immune systems occupied, so they start attacking us. That’s right: they think we have allergies because our immune systems are fucking BORED.
• Which means that a (gross) experimental treatment for everything from hayfever to goddamn Crohn’s disease is to infect the sufferer with hookworms.
• There are two main types of sail plans in ships: square rig and fore-and-aft rig.
• Bill Nye the Science Guy is as awesome as I have always heard.*
• Team-building is a scam.
• Those obnoxious self-righteous hippies are right: things do taste better straight from the garden.
• Especially strawberries. I finally understand what all the damn fuss is about.
• Pumpkin vines are really prickly, yo.
• Gourd leaves, however, can be like velvet.
• You should always check the labels on the tomatoes you buy. Or maybe not, since what I grabbed thinking it was a cherry tomato plant turned out to be the most amazingly crazy heirloom tomatoes I’ve ever seen.
• That stupidly accented “Oh, hi, ___” people keep referencing is an impression of Tommy Wiseau in The Room.
• The Room is worse than hyperbolic people are making out to be. AND NOT IN AN ENTERTAINING WAY.
• The Crazy Pit of politics does not appear to have a bottom.
• Great horned owls are surprisingly adorable.
• The X-Files is a really boring show.
• But its not!spinoff, Millennium, is pretty good.
• I am not the only grownup in the world who still fails to see the value of homework.
• Peasant blouses are a blast to make.
• The constellation Aquila is right where my uncle swears it is not.
• Sometimes your gallbladder can act up even if there are no gallstones anywhere near you, because your body hates you.
• Apparently Science can predict whether you will shop in a clockwise or counterclockwise pattern in a store—and it seems to correlate with which side of the road your country’s traffic rules say you drive on.
• The subject of "You're So Vain" is apparently a big old secret.  Seriously, knowing it is apparently worth $50,000.
• Dead laptop screens can actually be replaced!

*Somehow I missed the glorious age of Bill Nye, despite being smack in the middle of it. I was too busy watching Ghostwriter, and dammit with the advent of the information superhighway pretty much everything I learned on that show is now about as useful as knowing how to juggle.

Rewatching the Harry Potter movies, not in anticipation of the new one, but rather because I need a Rifftrax fix and really don’t feel like watching Eragon or The Matrix, well, ever again.* And I gotta admit, I can see why I abandoned it six books and four movies in. Underneath all that whimsy, I can’t escape the way the series boils down to a perfect example of the genre I call “Unlikable People Making Bad Decisions.”

Actually, some of my favorite movies are in that genre. Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity, and I suppose you could put Alien in that category as well, though I rather like most of the characters in those movies, up to and including Private William “GAME OVER MAN” Hudson. But the thing is, it’s because you’re not required to like the characters to enjoy the movie. In Harry Potter, you are supposed to like at least some of the characters, and that’s where I’m tapped out. (The same problem keeps me from enjoying the Unlikable People Making Bad Decisions shows my sister and mom enjoy, such as Private Practice and Desperate Housewives.) Characters determined to make the worst possible decision at any given moment, who are so exceedingly touchy that essentially the taunt of “Your mom!” induces any of them to homicidal rampages, are not characters I can really like.

Add to that the completely arbitrary nature of the magical world, and the way EVERY SINGLE TEACHER seems to be actively trying to get their students killed,*** and I find myself wondering what I did see in the Harry Potter stories.

I am enjoying the riffing of them, though. Especially since Mike, Kevin, and Bill have made a running joke of the reckless endangerment wizards and witches seem to put their children into at all times. But alas, I have run out of Harry Potter riffs for now, and will have to turn elsewhere for my mockery.

Hmm. I wonder if Michael Sheen makes an appearance as Count Fabulous in Eclipse …


*Actually, I got back on the Rifftrax kick while letting my current bout of Alien obsession run its course. I’d exhausted the number of times I could watch Alien and Aliens, then watch them again with audio commentaries,** without feeling just a little repetitive. Plus, anyone doing John Hurt impressions makes me giggle. (“I remember … doing something stupid … then something else stupid …”)

**I have long suspected that commentaries are designed for the obsessive nerd who doesn’t want to feel like they’ve had the damn movie on a constant loop for a week. It’s totally different this time! There are people talking about the movie!

***Except for Snape. The only one whose loyalties you’re supposed to question is the only one who’d shove himself between a werewolf and three children he can’t stand. Snape, like Raistlin, is a character I love in a franchise I really don’t like. Yeah, yeah, have at me, internet.

They weren’t kidding: the 2006 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the worst yet. Its messages seem to be that we need war, rape, murder, etc. in order to enjoy the full breadth of creativity, love, and colorful clothing, and also that delicious Pepsi products will keep us human. But more to the point, it was not creepy enough. The wonderfully creepy part of the other movies is that body snatching meant a soulless alien version of you was dumping your dead and disintegrated remains into a trash compactor. No wonder this movie sucked. It had nothing to do with pods, although it did have something to do with people, unlike Experiment 303.*

Also, did anyone notice that the actual hero of the story was Steve the Doctor, who was barely in it? It was the weirdest bit of tokenism ever—movie focuses on a bunch of panicky white people running around having Family Issues and bemoaning violence, and meanwhile in the background Black Doctor #2 sneaks off to his Secret Fortress Of Science, figures out how to CURE pod people—something no other version has done**—then, because the idiot protagonists won’t shut up, jumps in his helicopter to rescue their flailing asses. I wanted the movie to be about him.***

After seeing all four movies, I am surprised that not one of them took advantage of the Capgras delusion. You’d think a movie that starts out with people stubbornly insisting that their world is suddenly populated with evil impostors would totally jump at the chance to toss in a red herring about an actual neurological condition that causes people to stubbornly insist that their world is suddenly populated by evil impostors. Perhaps I will just have to make my own Body Snatchers movie, since I’ve run out of these. So a shout-out to my movie-making buddy Josh: If you’re reading this, I have a pitch for you!


FAVORITE PART: When the CDC villain guy in the beginning returns from examining the contaminated shuttle debris, walks back through the quarantine tent, strips off his HAZMAT suit, and then immediately bare-hands a piece of fungus-encrusted debris handed to him by a little girl. I half-expected him to start chewing on it, like Wilford Brimley chewing on the pencil eraser he has JUST POKED INTO A GELATINOUS DEAD MASS OF MUTATED NORWEGIANS in John Carpenter's The Thing.


*It still had everything to do with hurting, however.

**Sorry, teen slasher 90s remake, the 30,000 missiles mounted on that one helicopter do not count as a cure. And yes, the aforementioned lack of actual body-snatching makes the possibility of a cure lame, but BY GOD don’t knock the guy who found it.

***It also didn’t hurt that I thought the actor, Jeffrey Wright, was so darn cute I looked him up on Wikipedia, where his bio has the awesome line “Wright was born in Washington, D.C. to a mother who worked as a customs lawyer and a father who died when he was a child.” That right there is linguistic ambiguity at its very best.

I was planning on editing and posting my latest What I Learned list today, but the combination of a murdersome headache with the Period From Hell has reduced me to the same level of witty articulation as the Drugs Are Like That Twits, so that’s gonna have to wait. Meanwhile, off to have tea and Advil.

So my sister and I saw the Rifftrax for The Last Airbender.*

Wow. That was … impressively bad.

I mean, I’ve seen terrible movies, but I’ve never seen one that was so … artistic about it. There’s something sublime about the way they took a fantastic series—a truly sweeping fantasy story—whitewashed it,** and made it into an experience rather like … well, like watching my screensaver.

Yes, my screensaver specifically. My screensaver is probably a significant portion of my hard drive. It is a slideshow format that cycles through over 4700 images I’ve collected over a decade—concept art, photographs, portraits, drawings, anything that strikes my fancy online hits my screensaver. It rotates silently along, displaying random pretty images that have no real connection, no thread, nothing to tie them together. Just picture, picture, picture. TLA was rather like watching that. It did have pretty set design and costumes (no idea if they had any Asiafail, because I am not an expert, but it sure LOOKED nice), but the images apparently cycled across the screen at random.

Of course, the simile falls apart when you realize that the character sketches that also live on my screensaver were chosen because the characters—who cannot move or speak, as they are static images—were somehow interesting. This never happened in TLA. Nothing happened in TLA.

The attention to detail was the stunning part. Aside from the sets and costumes (which could still be wrong),*** I was impressed at how they managed to get every single thing wrong. Fun highlights:

-The Harpo Guy Jackson Rathbone being chosen for Comic Relief. Remember when you did Read Aloud Time in class and there was always a kid who did not understand that punctuation was there to change how you read something? That was Harpo’s line-reading strategy. He just ran through each word as fast as possible. I never thought I’d say this, but when you’re the comic relief, you do need to mug some, or it looks vaguely creepy. He needed Actual Sokka's advice to do real comic relief. ("Aang, would you say that you and Toph have a ... ROCKY relationship?")

-The pointless conversations between Aasif Mandvi (who is better than this movie) and Cliff Curtis (who is also better than this movie), one of whom can apparently teleport to the other’s house for their scenes. The Firelord is not the immediate antagonist in the first season; he’s a looming threat of Greater Travails To Come. Here he’s just an actor who is rather glad he hasn’t gotten killed in the first ten minutes of the movie, as usually happens to Curtis.

-Uncle E-I-E-I-roh’s accent. He is the only person with an accent. His nephew, his fellow officers, and his brother do not have accents. Nobody does. Just him. (MY SISTER: “You just know he went off to the Spirit World and came back with this pretentious accent—like when some American goes to the UK and comes back sounding like Masterpiece Theater.”)

-Pronouncing “Aang” like you’re a Honker from Sesame Street. My sister and I couldn’t help but honk back every time they’d honk his name, and then we’d collapse into giggles.

In conclusion: The Rifftrax wasn’t all that great, either. Don’t even bother with this movie. You want a good Rifftrax, go watch the OTHER Avatar, the James Cameron one, with Mike, Kevin, and Bill along, because that was goddamn PRICELESS. And then god dammit go watch the animated Avatar series. And if you want a badly cast, not-quite-accurate version of the show that’s actually interesting, the Ember Island Players already got that covered for you in the show itself.

Anyway, off to watch the animated duel between Katara and Master Pakku again. Just, you know, FOR COMPARISON.


*No, don’t panic, nobody got any money from me for that movie, except for the Rifftrax guys. And the public library would, because I got snowed in and couldn’t return it on time, but hell yeah I work there and don’t GET late fees. THAT’S RIGHT YOU WISH YOU WERE ME.

**As a white person, let me just say THANK GOD there were no nonwhite people among the protagonists. Such a thing would obviously have brought my tiny egocentric world crashing down around me because FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE the heroes wouldn’t look like me, and we can’t be having THAT. I was of course threatened enough by the Extras and Villains of Color. Can you imagine the chaos and of course lost revenue I would have generated if anyone in the foreground didn’t have blue eyes? Why, when I saw that the cartoon had no white people I had to lie down on the fainting couch for several hours, and of course I never spent any money buying all three seasons and the big book o’ concept art!

***And one inspired moment when ( they added a neat effect to that one spoilery thing that happened in Season 1 )