Trabia Garden

Just realised I don't think I've ever told this story here: once upon a time, my mum made the mistake of trusting my dad to set up her Facebook profile. He set her relationship status as 'It's Complicated' for his own amusement, then went, 'Wait, no, all our friends are going to see that and they're going to talk; better change it to "Married".'

So he did.

Naturally, Facebook informed all her friends, '[Riona's Mum] has gone from a complicated relationship to married.'

She got a lot of responses saying 'Congratulations!' and 'Does your husband know?'


A handful of notes I've found scribbled down in my diary:

How would society have developed differently if, rather than going to the loo, people had a medical need to sing the Backstreet Boys classic 'I Want It That Way' every four hours or so?

Sometimes you learn a cool fact and you want to share it with people, and all anyone wants to know is 'why were you looking up circumcision rates in different countries, Riona? Why do you know so much about French incest law, Riona?' (The answer, incidentally, is almost always 'fanfiction research'.)

Note to self: don't ask [friend] if they're going to put food up their arse any more.


On an entirely different note, the poorly drawn spider is still dispensing writing tips! It hasn't covered all the topics you guys requested, I'm afraid, but the blog's settled into a weekly update schedule, so it'll get there. If you like writing advice but hate good illustrations, this may be the blog for you.

I'm up to episode 2.02 of Lucifer, after which I immediately went looking for fanfiction in which Lucifer and his mother bang. Disappointingly, there doesn't seem to be any. Is this a real fandom at all?

Lucifer continues to be a delight. The writers, the actors, whoever's responsible for the hilariously on-the-nose musical choices: everyone involved with that show seems to be having a whale of a time. It's absolutely ridiculous and I love it. Lucifer himself is an extremely fun character: so self-absorbed, so weirdly innocent.

Also, for some reason I can't get enough of this stupid plotline:

Decker: Hmm, there's something strange about my partner.
Lucifer: I have been one hundred percent open with you about the fact that I am literally Satan.
Decker: What could it beeeeee?

'Extremely poorly-kept secrets being dragged on and on and on' can start to wear thin after a while (see Merlin), but it works better when the situation is 'it's not even a secret; it's just so stupid that nobody believes the truth, thus creating a mystery'.

Lucifer has intriguing potential for one of my favourite relationship dynamics: a man and a woman, he's helplessly in love with her, she likes him but doesn't need him nearly as much as he needs her. (I am, to clarify, talking about Lucifer and Decker, rather than Lucifer and his mother.)

Lucifer/Father Frank (from the episode 'A Priest Walks Into a Bar') is also extremely good. I don't often get invested in pairings involving a single-episode character, but Father Frank managed it!


Unrelatedly: haven't had a Man-Spider comic in a while.



He tries so hard.

WHO WANTS MAN-SPIDER COMICS?

I don't care; you're getting them anyway. In this edition you'll find out what Man-Spider gets up to when he feels like a swim (hint: it involves swimming), but first we're going to pay a visit to his Victorian ancestor. Man-Spider's manlike powers aren't hereditary, of course; he was bitten by a radioactive man. It is perhaps curious that his ancestor has similar powers. I suppose that family just has really bad luck around radioactive humans.


( The Victorian and Swimming Adventures of Man-Spider. )


I'm sort of astonished by my own inability to draw this character in a consistent way. He's just an oval with dot-eyes and stick-legs! It's hard to envision anything less difficult to draw! I'll never be an artist.

On Wednesday evening, not having much to do, I turned on the television to find some sort of BBC school drama. Two schoolboys were speaking urgently, facing each other in an otherwise empty room; one, Josh, was explaining that he didn't fancy his girlfriend, and the other, Finn, was saying 'who cares; it's still a lay, isn't it?'

Well, I thought, this feels oddly homoerotic, and then I thought honestly, Riona, are your slash goggles on so tightly that you're seeing pairings seconds into an unknown television programme?, and then Josh leant in and kissed Finn.

My timing is immaculate.

I watched Josh's 'oh no I might be gay and now my friend hates me :(' agonising for the rest of the episode, and the moment I next had Internet access I used it to find out what exactly I had watched an episode of. Apparently it was a BBC One drama called Waterloo Road! (The fourth episode of the sixth series, in fact; I was a little surprised to discover that there were six series, because I had never heard of this programme before.) I don't know whether I'll be watching any more of it (there is, I'll admit, a possibility that I'll watch until the Josh-Finn storyline is resolved and a slightly larger possibility that I've been fast-forwarding through previous episodes to find bits where Josh stares longingly at Finn, but the rest of it didn't really catch my interest), but it's good to know what it is.

Not least because it means I can find the scene onto which I so serendipitously stumbled. Here it is! It's only about a minute long.


Anyway, I'm not sure of how much interest the Waterloo Road part of this entry will be to you, so I'm also included the ineptly illustrated adventures of Man-Spider: the spider with the powers of a man. Sorry about the lined paper; I scribbled it down in my diary.


( MAN-SPIDER, MAN-SPIDER, DOES WHATEVER A MAN... PIE... ER... )


Yeah, I don't know.

(I actually attempted to render the entire Final Fantasy VIII storyline in comic form some years ago, despite being completely incapable of drawing (this is not false modesty; I'm genuinely terrible. The only facial features the characters have are eyes and eyebrows, and half the time I draw them with their eyes closed). I only got up to the SeeD exam in Dollet before abandoning the project, having realised that I couldn't even pretend to be able to draw Biggs and Wedge (which is a shame, because I was rather looking forward to having them recite the Team Rocket motto), but perhaps I should scan in what I did manage at some point? Might be mildly amusing.)