Fayanora: The Djao'Mor'Terra Collective

I doubt I will ever understand murderers. I struggle to understand other people in general to begin with, but murderers make even less sense to me than others. I don't even know where to begin with this topic. Hmm... okay, I'll start with "why in the fuck would you ever tell anyone else you had done a murder unless it was because you were turning yourself in?" The number of times I've seen true crime shows where part of it was talking about someone in the killer's life, like a friend or family member or even just a cell-mate in jail, was able to testify that the killer bragged about killing someone... it just makes no sense at all to me. Especially in the cases of people who have no remorse for their crimes. Like seriously... I could never kill anyone, I think. I empathize with trees, and when I was a kid, I thought I killed a baby bird once. Remembering that makes me sad every time I think of it. If I did kill anyone, it would most likely be by accident, and I would be one of those people who immediately called the cops about it while crying.

But if for some reason I decided to be stupid enough to try to get away with it, the last fucking thing I would do would be to tell anybody about it or write it down anywhere; it would be listed in my brain as "information you couldn't torture out of me." I don't even understand deathbed confessions of such things because what, you kept the secret for decades and now you're gonna blab because you might be dying? Well great, that's commendable of you, but this raises the question: what if you're wrong? What if you're not actually dying? What if you finally confess after all these years, and you then get better and live another decade or three? I have anxiety brain; I would absolutely worry about that, no matter how close to death I was. I could be torn in half and gurgling my own blood out of my mouth, and still be thinking "but what if I get better?" Yet all too often, these morons blithely brag about it instead.

I watch true crime things because I despise murderers, and I love finding out how these assholes get caught, the process of solving the mysteries. But yeah, so many things piss me off with these cases. The crimes always piss me off, the motives never really make sense to me (even the "money" motive doesn't make much sense to me often because I'm pretty sure insurance companies don't ever pay out if someone was murdered, even if none of the beneficiaries were the murderers, which is why the common advice is "make it look like an accident"), there's almost always some degree of police incompetence and/or apathy involved, a great many of these killers are just so gods-damned stupid doing shit like leaving evidence laying around in their house or in their computer without even putting the files of their evidence into an encrypted drive, and on top of everything else, I'm always wondering how these idiots think they're going to get away with it even if they avoid stupid mistakes. I've watched enough true crime stuff to know that the only people who ever get away with murder are people who are ridiculously lucky. Even when they avoid all the ridiculous mistakes of other killers, they almost always get caught eventually, no matter how idiotic or apathetic the cops are. (And all cops are idiotic; there is an upper IQ limit to being a cop. Yes, that means it is possible and even easy to be too intelligent to be hired as a cop, as that upper limit is not much higher than the average IQ. They will literally not hire anyone who is much more intelligent than the average because they want people just smart enough to do the job, but stupid enough to go along with the myriad forms of corruption inherent in the system. Which is why most cops tend to be former schoolyard bullies.)

It also really pisses me off when some of these killers get off with really light sentences, like six years. Six years, for murder! Now, bear in mind I am mostly for prison abolition -- IE, getting rid of the current prison system because the system is racist, classist, and is set up in a way that encourages repeat offenses. So for most crimes, I believe the consequences of those crimes should be therapy and rehabilitation. Lots of crimes would also be almost entirely prevented with the implementation of Universal Basic Income, universal health care, and ideally an end to capitalism entirely.

But murder and other violent crimes like rape should absolutely be exceptions to prison abolition. Sure, the murder rate would go way down if money was no longer an issue for people -- if people could live in comfort and not have to be crushed under the weight of capitalism. But it would not be entirely eliminated because there are many other motives for murder, including sexual violence and misogyny. So yeah, prison abolition for the most part, with only the most violent criminals going to prison. Any crime that wasn't violent, or was only mildly violent like a bar fight, the answer is basically "court-ordered therapy / rehabilitation." But serial killers and people guilty of just one or two brutal murders, they would still go to prison. If you end someone's life on purpose or try to cover up an accidental killing, that should be an automatic sentence of life in prison with NO chance for parole, once your guilt has been determined.

Anyway yeah, I'm probably rare for being a true crime 'enjoyer' who both hates the criminals AND the cops. So many true crime fans are freaks who either want to suck murderer dick or cop dick or both. I also prefer the channels that are respectful of the victims and their families, like Crime Zone, Mr. Ballen, and Lore Lodge.

Crime Zone is especially good in this respect, as the first few minutes of the episodes are always focused on getting to know the lives of the victims, and the ends of the videos usually say a few more things to emphasize the victims and their loved ones. They also have so much content that I've been binging it for a few months now and still haven't run out. And the narrator guy's voice is very clear and soothing.

The fact that the world had a little ice age at the time of the black death just proves the black death could not possibly be the bubonic plague. There was already a lot of weird things about this theory that didn't add up, like the black death hitting a lot of places way too cold for fleas in the first place, and the fact the climate was even colder back then just makes that even weirder. It's far more likely the black death was a hemorrhagic fever. THAT fits the available evidence very well, unlike the theory of it being bubonic plague.

Apart from proofreading and related edits, book 7, "Vasanti Sultana and the Riddle of Hope," is done. It has 73 chapters, and 1067 pages.

And I also just found out that not only was compiling it in an ODM file the extremely aggravating way to do it, that caused me massive amounts of stress and frustration every time I added new chapters to it, but it was all a fucking POINTLESS WASTE OF FUCKING TIME because ODM files cannot be exported to Epub format; it gives me a weird error message whenever I try to do it. So the old way of doing things, where I just copy-pasted every chapter's text one after the other into one massive ODT file, was the right way to do it all along. FML. I will do that later. I ain't fucking with it right now.

I have been having issues reading for the last year or so, you might be aware. Only thing I had been reading during that time had been audiobooks, and even then sometimes I wasn't able to finish them. Well I finally managed to read something that wasn't an audiobook. It was a novella, but still...

A few weeks ago I bought "What Stalks The Deep" by T. Kingfisher on Kobo because I had signed up for a Kobo account to get books through them instead of on Amazon, and this one was on sale some weeks ago so I bought it and it languished there for a while, until I got bored enough to start reading it. I was mildly annoyed that I had missed the fact it wasn't an audiobook, but I soldiered on ahead anyway. And in just like, two or three days, I read the whole thing! Helps that it's a novella, but still... progress. Also mildly annoyed it's number three in a series, but the little bits of spoilers in the book for book 1 and 2 just has me all the more excited to read those.

Here's the review I wrote on GoodReads about it:

An excellent book filled with a mix of horror, Westerns, humor, and sci-fi. I love the casual LGBT representation done without stereotypes. All the characters are just ordinary people, ultimately, like in the real world. Yes, the era the books take place in is well before most modern terminology, but the books reflect that, everything feeling organic to the setting and the times.

An aspect of that is that one of the LGBT representations in this book was such a slow burn that it took the main character -- who by today's terminology in the West would be "non-binary, presenting male, assigned female at birth" -- half the book to suspect what was going on, and took even longer for that to be confirmed.

The main character's culture and gender is fascinating, too. Alex is Galacian, and in that culture apparently they have half a dozen different sets of pronouns, the one Alex uses is the set for soldiers: ka/kan. But they also have pronouns for men, women, children, priests, rocks, and God. And because the Galacian culture is a real world culture (in what is currently part of Spain), that just makes it all the more fascinating.

I was also deeply fascinated with the biology of this book's monster, and it is making me deeply eager to read the other books in the series. Because yes, I didn't realize this was the third book in the series when I bought it, and so I need to go back and read books one and two. But while this book does have some spoilers for those first two books, I don't think I'm really losing out on much by reading them out of order.

-- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7650697029?book_show_action=false

Refusing to take a polygraph test should be right up there with immediately lawyering up: the smart thing to do. Polygraphs are pseudoscience, and the guy who invented them was horrified when he learned police were using them to interrogate people. So yes, refuse to take a polygraph because they're bullshit.

Also, never talk to cops without your lawyer present because cops have no scruples, and they don't care about the truth, they only care about being seen to have caught the perp. "Even if I'm innocent?" ESPECIALLY if you're innocent! They can and will do everything they can get away with to make you say something that will incriminate you even if you are entirely innocent. Hell, there are multiple cases are people who were mentally disabled, including people with developmental disabilities ("mentally retarded" in the old language), who were convicted, sentenced, and even put to death for crimes they could not possibly have committed.

All these true crime content makers need to stop acting like refusing to take a polygraph test is anything other than a good idea. Same with people who lawyer up right away.

For the chapter I am currently working on, I am trying to determine how often Portland, Oregon picks up road kill, or at least figure out which department takes care of that so I can ask.

The animal in question, a feral cat, died "a few days ago" after being hit by a vehicle, and Dalia will want to give it a proper burial if it's still there (her own cat - Alice - found it, and given that Alice is magical and much smarter than mundane cats, she could easily lead Dalia to the find).

I suppose I can either ask the librarians tomorrow, or Brooke suggested calling the city or county info lines. But if anyone knows before then, that'd be great. (It's after midnight right now.)

It's another of those minor details, as the dead cat isn't the main issue -- the main issue is she had kittens, that were found hungry from a few days of being left alone. But Dalia would still want to give the mama a funeral and a grave if she can. A memorial would be possible still if the body can't be recovered, but not as satisfying as having a body to bury. Though even in winter, a dead cat's body after a few days would probably be a real mess.

In the new Star Trek series taking place in the future Disco era, the Cherons -- the "black on one half, white on the other" species -- are back, and people are asking how that can be, if there were only two of them left alive in the TOS episode about them -- both men, and both dead by the end of the original episode.

My thoughts:
1. We know they were space-faring, otherwise the episode would never have happened. So maybe the ones from their world who weren't racist left together to find another world to colonize, and it was just the ones still on the homeworld that killed each other off.
2. Maybe someone thought "hey, let's give their species a second chance" and cloned members of their species from DNA samples left on the surface.
3. Both of the above.

Personally, I prefer the idea that the non-racists got together and were like "fuck these racist assholes, let's go start a colony together, my mirror-image friends."

Though I do have an additional idea along with the "non-racist Cherons started a colony together." What if two other colonies were also made? Members of one race that were just racist enough to not want to be around the other race, but not so racist that they wanted to hunt down the other race, what if they went off and made a second colony? And then the same kind of middle-ground racists from the other race made a third colony for the same reasons?

Yeah, I like that. And maybe have all three colonies be in the Beta Quadrant. The Beta Quadrant doesn't get as much love and attention as the other quadrants in Star Trek.

Brooke and I also speculated a bit about if the two races could interbreed, and what their mixed-race children would look like. At first I was like "Well let's break out the punett squares and figure it out like it was eye color." Then to be funny, I said "checkerboard pattern!" Brooke said "all black or all white" next. Then we settled on "one or the other must be a dominant trait, or else the conflict would never have started." Or at least would never have been that extreme.

Of course, the real mystery here is "who the hell thought a walk-in oven was a good idea?" Like legitimately, how did this idea get past the idea stage? The moment someone suggested it, everyone else in the room should have said, "Are you fucking insane?!!?"

An idea for a story I just got from watching a video about the reasons for the Salem witch trials (it wasn't ergot, it was likely a mass panic event triggered by the pre-existing mental illness called Christianity). The idea is simple: the Devil or something like it is real (no idea about god in this story), but the Devil wasn't taking in covens of witches. No no no. What it was doing was much more subtle. In this story idea, the Devil plants the idea of witches in the minds of the "righteous," causing supposed Christians to stray from the path Jesus laid out by their paranoia snowballing into a religious panic event where "the least of these" get targeted for violence.

It's an interesting idea, I think. And I think the best way to go about it would be that none of the ideas the Devil gives people are new ideas, just he's taking pre-existing human ideas and using them to start a fire of paranoia and violence. Thus the evil is still caused by humanity, the Devil is just fanning the flames.

I'm giving this idea freely to anyone who wants to write it because there are a great many reasons I know I could not do this idea justice. I know my limitations as a writer.