Pastor of Muppets

@king-goldfish

Im gay; read my books:

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Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· 2d

I noticed Reddit signed me out when it suddenly started showing me pictures of maple syrup and Prince Edward Island because my VPN is set to Canada

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· 9d

two-pixel image of Tom's soul leaving his body to ascend a glowing golden escalator with the caption "the descriptivism leaving my body when someone spells it 'woah'"

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· 16d

I don’t know how this happened, but I assume the cat was involved

Bottle of stain remover somehow balanced in its head by the washing machine

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Jun 30

WHO asked for this AI image of Octavio Paz? I have to know who the audience for this is

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Jun 19

Got my copy of Little Wolf in the Storm by @adikgraves.bsky.social today! I had the pleasure of beta reading and helping to edit this one, so I can safely say you should rush out to buy it rn! www.amazon.com/Little-Wolf-...

Paperback copy of Little Wolf in the Storm by adik graves

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Apr 22

Does anyone speak Italian here?? What offensive thing did I say to the language-learning AI? Have I unknowingly sexually harassed the AI cameriere (or is it just wrong again like it’s wrong about everything)?

Busuu AI conversation:

Quale carne desidera?

Abbiamo vitello, pollo, manzo, agnello e bistecca.
* Non mangio vitello. Avete il maiale?
Avete il maiale?

Per favore, niente linguaggio offensivo.
Continuiamo!

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Apr 20

My dad sent me this message about Will Anderson's contract extension to my work email. It is a matter of professional import that I know how much my boy is getting paid ASAP.

Email from my father:

FTI (N.b. I assume he means FYI)

Will Anderson Jr. will be the highest-paid non-quarterback ever in the NFL after he agreed to a 3-year, $150 million extension with the Texans.

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Apr 16

Is this what the British think? Is this why they are the way that they are?

Text from Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory”:

'Oh yes, yes. I'll be off.' But he didn't stir: it was the child who came to him.
She stood in the doorway watching them with a look of immense responsibility. Before her serious gaze they became a boy you couldn't trust and a ghost you could almost puff away, a piece of frightened air. She was very young - about thirteen - and at that age you are not afraid of many things, age and death, all the things which may turn up, snake-bite and fever and rats and a bad smell. Life hadn't got at her yet; she had a false air of impregnability. But she had been reduced already, as it were, to the smallest terms - everything was there but on the thinnest lines. That was what the sun did to a child, reduced it to a framework. The gold bangle on the bony wrist was like a padlock on a canvas door which a fist could break.
She said, 'I told the policeman you were home." old dad?'
'Oh yes, yes,' Captain Fellows said. 'Got a kiss for your She came solemnly across the room and kissed him formally upon the forehead - he could feel the lack of meaning. She had other things to think about. She said, I told cook that Mother wai

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Mar 25

I love my man Joe and all, but I don’t understand how this is possible unless everyone polled was a 35-year-old married father of three from the Baltimore suburbs hoping to prove something to his wife.

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Feb 14

Joe Burrow and Max Scherzer? This is what fantasy sports should be.

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Oct 30

I want Kiké Hernandez to be my weird uncle.

Uncle Kiké looking like he woke up late for his cocaine deal after the Grateful Dead concert. But honestly I love his style

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Aug 22

Some rabbits, but not all

From Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan, “…who can order her to do anything. She said, dear, that she'd burn down the whole place, burn down Gormenghast when she was the ruler and she'd live on her own, and I said she was wicked, and she said that everyone was - everyone and everything except rivers, clouds, and some rabbits. She makes me…”

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Aug 20

So the source of all these dragon myths is just someone’s drunk uncle? Yeah, my uncle slayed a dragon, too, buddy. Go get him a Lone Star and a pack of smokes and he’ll tell you all about it.

From Russian Myths by Elizabeth Warner: “where a vengeful mother dragon pursues the hero who has destroyed her sons.
The dragon in byliny
In the Kievan cycle of byliny, which dates to the tenth to fourteenth centuries and deals with the heroic defence of Kievan Rus against its external enemies, the dragon-slayer is Dobrynya Nikitich, often identified with the historical figure of Dobrynya who lived in the second half of the tenth century and was uncle to Vladimir I of Kiev.
The bylina about Dobrynya's fight with the dragon was a popular one, existing in more than one hundred versions. It usually begins with a parental warning. Dobrynya's mother forbids him to go bathing in the dangerous River…”

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Aug 4

I made this meme about how John was Jesus’s favorite disciple for my bff but they didn’t care, so I’m taking it back from them and giving it to y’all instead

“Mom who’s your favorite?” meme but it’s Jesus and John the Evangelist

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Jul 23

Poetry is gay. Knights are gay. War is gay.

“Both their shields are pierced and shattered....
The brave knights grapple, by and by, Black dust thrown high into the sky, As their steeds themselves engage, The combatants, twined, motionless, Clasp each other; tis war they wage, Yet glued to their saddles, no less, Their limbs squeezed near to excess.
Rigid now, locked tight together,
Swift fiery blood runs through each vein, Yet breast to breast, they toil in vain...
But both weaken now, and waver, One soon must fall - and, suddenly, With iron hand, our knight, tears free, Ousts from the saddle his tired foe, In his arms he lifts him, wholly, And hurls him to the waves below,
'Die then, my envious rival, go, Drown deep!' he cries maliciously.”

From Ruslan and Ludmila by Alexander Pushkin, trans. A.S. Kline

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Jun 17

Wow, this Bog (leaving it, better title anyway) Dead Energy book sure does keep ending up on staff picks lists; I wonder if it’s any good! tapas.io/series/Big-D...

Tapas community staff picks list with a bunch of novels including Big Dead Energy, which I wrote. Which you can read for free on Tapas!

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Jun 10

Beautiful night tonight

Image of anti-ICE protesters in the street facing down cop cars

Austin’s south congress bridge at sunset

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Jun 9

Thucydideez nutz

Thucydides: “During the same summer Nymphodorus, son of Pythes, an Abderite, whose sister Sitalces had married, was made their proxenus by the Athenians and sent for to Athens. They had hitherto considered him their enemy; but he had great influence with Sitalces, and they wished this prince to become their ally. Sitalces was the son of Teres and King of the Thracians. Teres, the father of Sitalces, was the first to establish the great kingdom of the Odrysians on a scale quite unknown to the rest of Thrace, a large portion of the Thracians being independent. This Teres is in no way related to Tereus who married Pandion's daughter Procne from Athens; nor indeed did they belong to the…”

“same part of Thrace. Tereus lived in Daulis, part of what is now called Phocis, but which at that time was inhabited by Thracians. It was in this land that the women perpetrated the outrage upon Itys; and many of the poets when they mention the nightingale call it the Daulian bird.
Besides, Pandion in contracting an
alliance for his daughter would consider the advantages of mutual assistance, and would naturally prefer a match at the above moderate distance to the journey of many days which separates Athens from the Odrysians. Again the names are different; and this Teres was king of the Odrysians, the first by the way who attained to any power. Sitalces, his son, was now sought as an ally by the Athenians, who desired his aid in the reduction of the Thracian towns and of Perdiccas.
Coming
to
Athens…”

Grandpa Simpson: “SO I TIED AN ONION
TO MY BELT, WHICH WAS THE STYLE AT THE TIME.”

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Jun 1

I have always wanted to post a Notes app screed. I would link the accounts I'm talking about so this would make more sense, but there's no point now, really, is there?

Anyway, I haven’t written Harry Potter fanfiction in years. I’m not going to rhapsodize about what the series meant to me as a child. There are other books—lots of them, in fact. I’ve even read a couple! What I will rhapsodize a bit about is how much writing these fanfics I’m about to take down meant to me. I loved it. All of it. I spent years writing these stories, and to say they helped me develop as a writer would be gross understatement. They made me the writer I am. There are things in them that make me cringe, and plenty of things I wouldn’t write now. But that just shows how they helped me learn, grow, and mature.

I loved these stories when I wrote them, and I love every person who has read and liked and commented on them over the years. Even now, decades after I wrote the first words of “The Life You Lose” (I must have been sixteen? It was far from my first fic), I still get sporadic emails saying someone has left kudos on it or written a comment. It makes my day, every single time.

Ironically but unsurprisingly, writing these Harry Potter fanfiction was a huge part of my transition. I used writing from a male POV—from Regulus’s POV, from Sirius’s POV—as escapism. I spent so much time in their worlds, in their skins, so I could avoid being in my own. They helped me realize that, while I couldn’t live in fictional skins all the time, I could make my own more comfortable. I could change my own world. It’s a story a lot of us have. I’m happy now, for the most part.

We comfort ourselves, sometimes, with the idea that the rich are cruel because they are unhappy, because there is some fathomless well inside of them that no amount of gold shoveled in will ever fill. Money can’t buy happiness and various other platitudes. And while I do believe that fathomless well exists, I don’t think it means the rich and cruel are unhappy. I think many—perhaps most, perhaps all—of the rich and cruel are too emotionally and mentally shallow to recognize their own hollowness. I think they are happy, in their own vapid way. I think being cruel gives them great joy and satisfaction. They’ve constructed realities in which their cruelty is justified and their wealth their earned reward. It’s impossible to be that wealthy and remain that wealthy without assigning yourself outsize importance far beyond the due of any single human being.

Look, me taking down a few fanfics that I love and some other people over the years have loved (or at least liked!) is not going to affect J.K. Rowling in any appreciable way. So why do it? Well, as a small act of spite, for one. Small acts of spite bring me joy, too. But it’s mostly because of those sporadic emails that used to bring me much greater joy. It’s mostly because occasionally, people are still stumbling on these fics, and I can’t stomach the idea that anyone might read something I wrote and be encouraged to stay engaged with Harry Potter and its fandom and ultimately to give Rowling any more money and attention—through merchandise, tickets to Universal, streaming numbers for the reboot, whatever various, nefarious revenue streams these goons have; I’m not an accountant—that she’ll use to humiliate, degrade, and strip the rights away from my trans sisters.

It’s a symbolic gesture. But it’s mine, and I’m making it.

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· May 15

I love Russian literature

From Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya:

HELENA. What a fine day! Not too hot.
(A pause.)
VOITSKI. A fine day to hang oneself.
TELEGIN tunes the guitar. MARINA appears near the house, calling the chickens.

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Apr 12

Xerxes screaming, "Serenity now!" as he whips the Hellespont

"What is right, that is my wish. I am no friend of the man who is a follower of the Lie.4
I am not hot-tempered. When I feel anger rising, I keep that under control by my
thinking power. I control firmly my impulses."

17. The kingly qualities
DNb; XP1. Two inscriptions, virtually identical in content, one inscribed on Darius I's tomb at
Naqsh-i Rustam (DNb), the other, in Xerxes' name, found 2 km north of Persepolis (XP1).
The Darius inscription is trilingual, the Xerxes one only survives in Old Persian: Kent, DNb;
editio princeps of XP1, Gharib 1967; Schmitt 2000, DNb; XP1.1
Translations: Lecoq 1997: 221—4; 259—61; Brosius 2000, no. 103.

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Apr 11

Have we tried this yet? This can’t be a worse way to put forward a candidate than whatever the DNC has been doing

85
THE HISTORIES
for Otanes only; they also agreed upon another to be shared by all: permission, namely, for any of the seven to enter the royal presence unannounced, except when the king was in bed with a woman. They further agreed that the king should not marry outside the families of the seven confederates. To choose which should be king, they proposed to mount their horses on the outskirts of the city, and he whose horse neighed first after the sun was up should have the throne.
Darius had a clever groom called Oebares. After the meeting had broken up, he went to see this fellow, and told him of the arrangement they had come to, whereby they should sit on their horses' backs and the throne chould ho horse neioh.

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Apr 10

Boom, roasted

BOOK TWO
163
displeased by this, as he soon showed; for when the rebels had actually offered him the throne, he prepared to lead them against Apries, who, hearing of the danger which threatened him, sent Patarbemis, a distinguished member of his court, with orders to bring Amasis alive into his presence. Amasis, however, in answer to Patarbemis' summons, rose in his saddle (he was on horseback at the time), broke wind
I, and told him to take that back to his
master. Patarbemis persisted in his request that the rebel should obey the king's command and go along with him, whereupon Amasis replied that that was precisely what he had long been intending to do: the king would have no cause of complaint upon that score - he would come, sure enough, and bring others with him. This answer, and the preparations he saw already going on, were enough to convince Patarbemis of Amasis inten-tions; he hurried back to the court, to inform the king with the least possible delay of the turn events had taken. On his arrival there without Amasis, Apries fell into a violent rage and, on the spur of the moment, ordered his nose and ears to be cut off. The Egyptians, who up to then had been loyal to the king, seeing a fellow countryman of such distinction treated in this shameful way, immediately went over to the rebels and put themselves at the disposal of Amasis. At the news of their detection, Apries armed his mercenaries (a body of 30,000 Carians and Ionians,

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Apr 1

The Herodotus-posting will continue until morale improves

Herodotus: “…criticizing these theories, I must express an opinion myself about a matter so obscure as the reason why the Nile floods in summer, I would say (to put the whole thing in the fewest words) that during winter the sun is driven out of his course by storms towards the upper parts of Libya. It stands to reason that the country nearest to, and most directly under, the sun should be most short of water, and that the streams which feed the rivers in that neighbourhood should most readily dry up.
But let me explain in somewhat greater detail my view of…”

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Mar 30

Well this is for sure the plot of my next novel

Herodotus: “a
Rhampsinitus possessed a vast fortune in silver, so great that no subsequent king came anywhere near it - let alone surpassed it. In order to keep the treasure safe, he proposed to have a stone building put up, with one of its walls forming a part of the outer wall of his palace. The builder he employed had designs upon the treasure and ingeniously contrived to construct the wall in such a way that one of the stone blocks of which it was composed could easily be removed by a couple of men - or even by one.
When the new treasury was ready, the king's money was stored away in it; and after the lapse of some years the builder, then on his death-bed, called his two sons and told them how clever he had been, saying that he had planned the device of the moveable stone entirely for their benefit, that they might live in affluence. Then he gave the precise measurements, and instructions for its removal, and told them that if only they kept the secret well, they would be the Royal Treasurers as long as they lived. So the father died and his sons lost no time in setting to work; they came by night to the palace, found the stone in the treasury wall, took it out easily enough and got away with a good haul of silver. The king, on his next visit to the treasury, was surprised to see that some of the vessels in which the money was stored were no longer full, but as the seals were unbroken…”

Herodotus: “and all the locks in perfect order, he was at a loss to find the culprit. When the same thing happened again, and yet again, and he found that each time he visited the chamber the level of the money in the jars had still further fallen, he ordered traps to be made and set near the money-jars. The thieves came as usual, and one of them made his way into the chamber; but, as soon as he approached the money-jar he was after, the trap got him. Realizing his plight, he at once called out to his brother to tell him what had happened, and begged him to come in as quickly as he could and cut off his head, lest the recognition of his dead body should involve both of them in ruin. The brother, seeing the sense of this request, acted upon it without delay; then, having fitted the stone back in its place, went home taking the severed head with him. Next morning the king visited his treasury, and what was his astonishment when he saw in the trap the headless body of the thief, and no sign of damage to the building, or any apparent means of entrance or exit! Much perplexed, he finally decided to have the thief's body hung up outside the wall, and a guard set with orders to arrest and bring before him anyone they might see thereabouts in tears, or showing signs of mourning. Now the young man's mother was deeply distressed by this treatment of her dead son's body, and begged the one who was still alive to do all he possibly could to think of some way of getting it back, and even threatened, if he refused to listen to her, to go to the king and denounce him as the thief. The young man made many excuses, but to no purpose; his mother continued to pester him, until at last he thought of a way out of the difficulty. He filled some skins with wine and loaded them on to donkeys, which he drove to the place where the soldiers were guarding his brother's corpse. Arrived there, he gave a pull on the necks of two or three of the skins, which undid the fastenings.

e
-44
THE HISTORIU
finally he changed his tune, and, appearing to have recovered his temper, drove the donkeys out of the roadway and began to rearrange the wineskins on their backs. Meanwhile, as he chatted with the soldiers, one of them cracked a joke at his expense and made him laugh, whereupon he made them a present of a wineskin, and without more ado they all sat down to enjoy themselves, and urged their benefactor to join the party and share the drink. The young man let himself be persuaded, and soon, as cup succeeded cup and the soldiers treated him with increasing familiarity, he gave them another skin. Such a quantity of wine was too much for the guards; very drunk and drowsy, they stretched themselves out at full length and fal asleep on the spot. It was now well after dark, and the thief took down his brother's body and as an insult shaved the right check of each of the guards. Then he put the corpse on the donkeys' backs and returned home, having done successfully what his mother demanded.
The king was very angry when he learnt that the thief's body had been stolen, and determined at any cost to catch the man who had been clever enough to bring off such a coup. I find it hard to believe the priests' account of the means he employed to catch him - but here it is: he sent his own daughter to a brothel with orders to admit all comers, and to compel each applicant, before granting him her favours, to tell her what was the cleverest and wickedest thing that he had ever done; and if anyone told her the story of the thief, she was to get hold of him and not allow him to escape. The girl obeyed her father's orders, and the thief, when he came to know the reason for what she was doing, could not resist the temptation to go one better than the king in ingenuity. He cut the hand and arm from the body of a man who had just died, and, putting them under his cloak, went to visit the king's daughter in her brothel. When she asked him the question which she had asked al…

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Mar 25

Found trying to clean out my Notes app

Notes app screenshot: “Gifts
の
Bitterness in this conclave is the opposite of love in this club”

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Mar 24

It’s a real knee-slapper, for sure

From Herodotus: “This same queen was also the perpetrator of a grim practical joke. She had a tomb made for herself over one of the main gateways of the city, right high up above the actual entrance and caused the following inscription to be cut on it: If any king of Babylon hereafter is short of money, let him open my tomb and take as much as he likes. But this must be done only in case of need. Whoever opens my tomb under any other circumstances will get no good of it. The tomb remained undisturbed til the reign of Darius, who resented being unable to use one of the city gates - for he never did use the one under the tomb because, had he done so, he would have had to drive directly under the corpse; moreover, he thought it was absurd, when treasure was lying there asking to be taken, not to take it. So he opened the tomb. He found, however, not a penny inside - but only the body of the queen and another inscription, which read: ‘If you had not been insatiably greedy and eager to get money by the most despicable means, you would never have opened the tomb of the dead.’ So much, then, for the character of Nicotris.”

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Mar 21

I love how fucking stupid our lawmakers are

Screenshot of a bill introduced in the Texas House which would prohibit “public institutions of higher education from providing instruction regarding the use of gender pronouns.”

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Mar 8

For anyone wondering, the scene in question (with spoilers blurred): tapas.io/episode/3104...

“We dug graves for XXX and XXX. Buried
their bones where they died. I was happy to give his broken skull a proper resting place, happy to cover it with dirt and let him return to the land. I took a fingerbone with me. The smallest knuckle from his smallest finger. I didn't tell XXX about it. I dropped it in my
pocket and felt its weight like the bottle of returner I had treasured and worried. When I slipped my hand in after it, it nestled next to my pinky.”

Pastor of Muppets@king-goldfish· Mar 3

Last entry in the Catalogue of Nipples. Sadly it comes a full seven books before the end, in Book Seventeen. I think I missed a few prior to Book Five. Next up, I will analyze who succumbed to wounds of the nipple and present conclusions