Kingfisher & Wombat
@UrsulaV
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I write & garden. Strong feelings about bugs, plants & heirloom vegetables. Wrote some books, won some awards. T. Kingfisher is my secret identity. She/Her
North Carolina, USA
Joined December 2007
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Pinned Tweet
IS THIS A PRE-ORDER I SEE BEFORE ME?!
It is! Coming December 5th, it’s Book Four of the Saint of Steel!
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You loved playing “Allergies or COVID?” Now get ready for “Mosquito Bite or Monkeypox!”
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Oh my god. Oh my god. *breathes into a paper sack*
If you have rabies symptoms, it’s too late. You are gonna suffer one of the worst deaths known to man and there is no power on earth that can save you.*
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Since apparently people have decided to slag on Waffle House today, allow me to say a few words, as a transplant to the South, about this institution.
Waffle House goes harder than 99% of us will ever go in our lives.
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I told doctors for years I was tired all the time, to no avail. They told me to just power through it and stay awake. One literally told me that “some people just need more sleep than others.”
Eventually my husband was like DO YOU KNOW YOU STOP BREATHING AT NIGHT?!
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This was such an amazing burn that I wanted everyone else to savor it with me.
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*beats head against desk* No. It. Isn’t.
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Talked to middle school student today who informed me that their school had a mural of famous women. A certain TERFy author face was eventually painted over “because we’d all kinda kick it whenever we went by, til there was a dent in the wall.”
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God, I love being a regular. The owner of the Greek place just came out to make sure I only wanted one dolmas instead of the usual five, and I explained that Kevin was out of town so I couldn’t eat them all by myself. He gave me two anyway, because I will not starve on his watch!
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O best beloved, if you are doomscrolling Twitter today, ask yourself if there is anything you can personally do.
If there is, do it. If there isn’t, remember that anxiety is not activism. Your misery does not improve the world a single iota.
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MY COUSIN: I tried to read one of your books and couldn’t.
ME: That’s fine! Tastes are very individual—
COUSIN: No, no, it’s absolutely brilliant, my friends love it, but in my head it sounds EXACTLY like when we used to give you too much sugar when you were five.
ME: …fair.
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Don’t try to gaslight me with this “belief” stuff, I’ve dealt with printers.
RESISTENTIALISM is the belief that inanimate objects can display malice or spitefulness towards people.
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If you’re ever feeling guilty about not cooking a fresh home-cooked meal, a reminder that people in cities historically either had cooks or ate at food stalls, going back to Ancient Greece. Ancient Egypt, too, although since everybody ate bread, beer, and onions, less of a thing.
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So I was on Tumblr and saw a post go by about how TERFs keep getting worked up about, say, intersex chickens, and someone else commented not to tell them about white-throated sparrows, and being me I immediately launched into OMG LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE SPARROW WITH FOUR SEXES
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In conclusion: Do not mock the Waffle House. Total strangers will take up arms in defense of those hashbrowns and tell you the story of how, when the world was literally on fire outside the windows, a gray-haired woman poured them coffee and called them “hon.”
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And this is why most of my friends gave up writing near-future sf, because this is horribly, hilariously plausible and NOBODY saw it coming.
Criminals will start wearing extra prosthetic fingers to make surveillance footage look like it's AI generated and thus inadmissible as evidence.
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Crafters and artists of the internet, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the time has come. We never thought it would happen, but here it is. It’s time.
Use the good art supplies you were saving.
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I finally read the OMG THE YOUNG MEN ARE NOT HAVING AS MUCH SEX article and tweets, which had a lot of correlation with precious little causation.
And it sure looks like the closest correlation was actually “are you living with your parents?” And yet…
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The face in question has since been replaced with Frida Kahlo, who has not suffered a similar fate.
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For anyone still on this site—got a call from the surgeon, they got all the cancer! I am officially cancer-free!
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I made another weird little comic thing, hopeful and a little bittersweet, about conservation after the apocalypse. A topic near and dear to my heart, Lord knows. (Technical notes in another thread, linked at the end.)
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I’m gonna say this again because it bear repeating: If you’re never allowed to celebrate a victory that’s anything less than total, you don’t end up with total victory. You just get a lot of burnt-out activists who go off and raise llamas or take heavily to the bottle.
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I love it when transphobic randos try to threaten my career by making my views public. Honey, when in the history of Twitter have I not shouted every opinion I have at top volume?
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Today is my first chemo treatment! Exciting!
…and of course I had to get a pregnancy test first.
ME: I have an IUD! He has a vasectomy!
NURSE: *helpless in the face of bureaucracy gestures*
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Leaving aside whether throwing soup at a painting is an effective protest or not, I gotta say that the fact the protest org is asking to be paid in cryptocurrency strikes me kinda like PETA asking to be paid in steak.
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Later, I would learn of the legendary Waffle House Index. When all else fails, when disaster is upon you, when the Angel has broken the seal and read from the scroll and fire and blood rains from heaven and the great Beasts sing before the throne…
…Waffle House is open.
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Remember, the big lie for a long time was that nothing was wrong.
Now the big lie is that it’s too late to fix it, so you might as well give up and decide humanity had a good run, oh well.
It’s the same lie. It’s the one that keeps you from interfering with profit margins.
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Seriously, though, the not-insignificant subset of humanity with the desperate need to FEED PEOPLE are one of my great proofs that humans are fundamentally pretty decent.
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*except maybe the Milwaukee Protocol, which is now considered to most likely be ineffective.
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Hey, everybody here knows that the one woman who said the dingo ate her baby got exonerated years later, right? They found the kid’s clothes in a dingo den and the Australian government quietly freed her.
I feel like that got really overlooked.
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I am not one to praise a corporation. Capitalism is not my jam. You all probably know that by now (unless you wandered in from a retweet, in which case, hi!) But for all their flaws, Waffle House offered health insurance to hourly employees back when that was laughable.
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Waffle House is staffed, inevitably, by a gray-haired white lady who calls everyone “hon” and offers you refills on your coffee and by a black man working the grill who gives the impression that if Elvis, Jesus, and DB Cooper walked in, arm in arm, he would not so much as blink.
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They bring in teams that do include restaurant workers, but they also bring in people who can fix gas pipes, contractors who can clear debris, drivers who can bring in food trucks, etc, because Waffle House Goes Hard.
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My spoiler-free review of DUNE:
That was the single most humorless movie I have ever seen. There is one joke, delivered by Jason Momoa, in the first ten minutes. Cherish it. There will not be another.
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You haven’t failed at a normal human task, you have been sold an unrealistic expectation and told it was a normal human task. Go get takeout. Or beer, bread, and onions. Eat cheese and some dates. Relax.
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They also give PTO to hourly employees, which is still nearly unheard of, and they only promote managers internally, which is still pretty darn unusual.
But for the rest of us, they are the hot meal in the end times.
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The oncology office has a new check-in machine.
ME: So this machine means it all takes five times as long?
WOMAN AT DESK: *teeth gritted* It’s what we’re doing now.
ME: So…yes, but you don’t wanna say it?
HER: Yes, but I can’t say that officially.
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I have only known a few people in my life who were truly, deeply faithful to their religion. But I have known a great many cooks who needed to see people fed with a passion that eclipsed any paladin’s loyalty to their god.
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…somehow this requires a manifesto about needing a “right to sex” instead of, I dunno, a manifesto about lowering housing prices.
(Meanwhile, of course, young women were also having less sex, but hey, that’s probably Good and Pure or something.)
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Hyperbole aside, in the event of disaster and apocalypse, as mentioned above, Waffle House literally had “jump teams” that are scrambled because they know that A) local employees can’t necessarily work and B) people in disaster zones will need hot food.
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It’s a weird quirk of our obsession with nuclear families that everybody is expected to have time, skill, and equipment to cook daily and that if you’re a woman, particularly, you are a lesser person if you aren’t casually able to cook every day with random fresh ingredients.
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As many, many people have said before, it is so weird to stand on this precipice, looking down at Real Bad Shit Coming, and yet of necessity be so mired in the everyday struggle that you still have to do stuff like eat and make wordcount and stake the tomatoes.
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TREE LAW HAS BEEN INVOKED
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If you have ever been stuck in the dark, in the cold, without hot food, and then found an open Waffle House, you know what it meant to you.
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@Jason_McEwan
@KellyJoBluen
@shabbirie
Your wife would probably also wipe your butt if you broke both arms, but that doesn’t mean you get to demand all women do it.
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Undoubtedly they do make money as the only place that’s open, but you note that Denny’s and Cracker Barrel isn’t rushing to follow in their footsteps. What they do is pretty damn impressive. Rumor is that their emergency procedure book even includes nuclear fallout.
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Fellow romance writers, I KNOW that sex scenes are hard, I know that it’s really diffivult to describe the same body parts over and over again, but calling the heroine’s mouth “her wet hole” is an automatic disqualification from the judges.
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Was it haute cuisine? No.
Was it good? I’m not sure.
Was is strangely, deliciously compelling? Yes.
Did I eat them all? Yes.
Have I gone back hundreds of times? Also yes.
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Their food is greasy spoon diner food. The waffles honestly do nothing for me. But long ago, my father said to me “There is this place called Waffle House, and they make these hashbrowns, and you get them all the way, and they are amazing. Also, I had to up my acid reflux meds.”
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I’m so old that I remember when the Onion was zany instead of savagely prophetic.
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I would not be surprised if their disaster prep included the Rapture. (“Jump teams of non-evangelical employees are assembled in the event…”)
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Ok, I forget my followers aren’t all plant people. Just to clarify, oleander is SUPER TOXIC. And it’s one of the bad deaths, where you puke and cramp and shit yourself until your heart gives out. Don’t do this.
NEW: To the alarm of some government health officials, Trump has expressed enthusiasm for the FDA to approve an extract from the oleander plant as a dietary supplement to cure COVID-19, despite lack of proof that it works.
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The sickest bit, to me, is that Oceangate deliberately classified the tourists as “mission specialists” because killing crew is fine but killing tourists shuts you down.
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So…uh…the biopsy news wasn’t great. The big painful lump is malignant. I go in next week to meet with the surgeon and we find out stuff like “what stage” and “lumpectomy vs mastectomy” and stuff.
It’s weird, but as much as I was panicked, I don’t think I really expected it.
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Don’t buy into that. People since forever have hired cooks, gone to inns, lived in extended families where it wasn’t always your turn to cook, or ate such simplified diets that it was less of an issue.
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The Waffle House thread went viral, and the QTs are, for once, remarkably consistent.
1% — whatever, you didn’t need to write a whole thread
1% —ugh, cringe, you’re probably a Yankee who moved to Charlotte and think you know the South
98% — I WOULD FISTFIGHT GOD FOR WAFFLE HOUSE
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So apparently there’s just straight up an adenovirus that makes you fat, and we’ve kinda known this for awhile now? And studies show that quite a lot of people have it?
Did everyone know about this thing but me? Cos I sorta feel like that should have been a bigger discussion.
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@SpaceTurtleArt
I honestly, no kidding, suspect it relates to fewer people watching Ol Yeller as kids.
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REJOICE WITH ME, INTERNET! Doc confirms that Cancer-Bob has shrunk substantially and is, quote, “squishier!” The chemo is working!
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@classiclib3ral
@MattWalshBlog
Look, the only way to stop a bad guy with a fetus is a good guy with a fetus.
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@EdwardWRiddell
@tanngrisnir
@BristolPost
If I had a nickel for every abusive act dressed up as "romance" I could fund every woman's shelter on earth for a year.
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Wait. Leonardo da Vinci was alive at the same time as Columbus? Really? Like...really?
My sense of history is a hundred different rooms with no doors between them. Wild.
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A non-zero number of you apparently did not know that The Last Unicorn was a book before it was a movie. It is by Peter S. Beagle. It is made of spun glass and fairytales and iron knives and there are individual lines that I would give my lungs to have written.
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Awww yeah! CT scan results came back, and Cancer-Bob is definitely still confined to the boob! Liver, lungs and lymph nodes clear!
Also bless doctors who leave messages that say “It’s good news!” instead of just “call me back.”
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There is very clearly a disaster bearing down on the Gulf Coast, and nothing I say or do can fix it. In the next few days, please remember that very rarely did people choose to be trapped there and that very rarely did they choose the government that fails them.
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(Possibly there are other configurations, but I have not witnessed them. But there are many Waffle Houses, and I am but one woman.)
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So this is Nazi shit. This is stuff people go to The Hague for, and I will personally, happily, with a song in my heart, drive anyone complicit with this organization there myself.
Whistleblower: There Were Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Facility | Law & Crime
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I’ll say it again—ideas are the LEAST important part of a book. The plot of HOGFATHER is that someone assassinates Santa Claus by stealing teeth from the Tooth Fairy, which looks utterly inane when typed out and is also one of the best books of the last hundred years.
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I made a mental note of this, and then, some time later, found myself moving to North Carolina, and lo! There was a Waffle House.
I slid into the booth, settled on the creaking leatherette seats, and ordered hashbrowns all the way, as my father has told me.
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If I actually have any young followers—don’t fall for this bullshit. Working for companies never got me anywhere and I certainly never had any money to save. Do cool shit. Nobody has ever been on their deathbed gasping “I wish…I’d put in…more hours…at work…”
It bothers me when I hear young employees talk about work/life balance at an early stage of their lives. Work your butt off at the beginning, make money, save it and then later in life aim for work/life balance as you will need it with kids and partners etc. this is my POV
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Got the first vaccine! Moderna for us! This means instead of the Bill Gates microchip, we have the far superior Dolly Parton microchip.*
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I love the Like button, not because I necessarily want to collect them like trading cards, but because it’s a really useful shortcut for “You said a thing to me and I want to acknowledge that I saw it and appreciate that you said it but I have nothing to add at this time.”
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Listen. You all know I��m a bit loopy about plants, but I am also remarkably unsentimental. Gardeners almost have to be. We kill a lot of plants. I have cut many many trees in my life.
I am telling you, to destroy a saguaro is a monstrous act.
.
@DHSgov
continues to topple ancient saguaro cactuses for
#BorderWall
construction at Organ Pipe. An arm on this giant had just started to fruit before it was bulldozed over.
Saguaros are deeply sacred to the Tohono O’odham, who have fought the wall strenuously from day one.
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Divergent evolution in plague doctors.
(I am nearly sure this idea has been done before, but I couldn’t resist the shoebill version.)
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God, science amazes me sometimes. I was emailing an old friend about paleontology geekery—he’s a paleoecologist—and he mentions casually that we can date the Chicxulub impact to early June because of the paddlefish otoliths.
Hang on, what now?
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You know what I could really use? A website that tells you plant toxicity for pets without being completely histrionic. Something that actually distinguishes “eh, the cat may barf” from “INSTANT KIDNEY FAILURE.”
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I want to know why the answer is always “force women have sex with these men” and not “execute men who haven’t had sex in X amount of years.” I mean, if we’re gonna descend into a nightmare hellscape, why does it always have to be MY nightmare?
how did we get from "an incel murdered women" to "let's seriously discuss their ideas" in like... 10 days
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I’m starting to think this happened like, once, and now people thinks it’s a generational inevitability. Meanwhile, all my friends and most of my relatives have gotten way more radicalized left as they age.
White millennials are gonna get conservative as fuck when they inherit their boomer parents houses, wealth, and connections. Believe me now, quote me later.
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Because I love
@MattFnWallace
enough to make crude explainer drawings at lunch.
@LyanaRodriguez1
I don’t learn biological things until
@UrsulaV
draws me an illustration explaining them it’s just how my brain is wired
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Of the many things about America that infuriates me, the one that I’m mad at today is that a huge number of people are scared to death of wolves, but treat wild sea lions like pleasant clowns of the sea.
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Steamy. This is a romance. Make it steamier, dammit!
*writes: "Her lips were soft and tasted like..."
*hour of research on medieval oral hygiene later*
*deletes*
*writes: "He gave her a very sexy handshake."
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…gang, this is a joke about our anxieties. You don’t actually have to send me things on how to diagnose monkeypox.
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And this, despite it all, is why I still love this hellsite.
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This is my favorite explanation of the Facebook outage yet.
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Beloved friends, I know it’s easy to feel like everything is getting worse, and god knows, I feel like that sometimes myself. But I try to remind myself that a hundred years ago, we hadn’t even discovered penicillin.
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So last night, at 2 AM, the doorbell rang. I staggered out of bed, went downstairs, and found a bedraggled Kevin, in a bathrobe, holding a dead squirrel. He looked at me and said “So I’ve had an adventure!”
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Just in case anyone following me doesn’t know this—it is damn near impossible to get a doctor to agree to do this surgery if you’re under forty and don’t already have multiple kids. And in some states? Your husband still has to sign off on it.
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@Richard__Aaron
@LibertyAnders
Oh, for god’s sake. Augustus Caesar passed morality laws in 18 BC because he thought there was too much premarital sex, so unless you happen to be 2000+ years old, this isn’t new behavior by anyone.
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@Lifes_Not_Foehr
@kittynouveau
Hi, I’m a professional horror author and damn if you didn’t make it even worse. Kudos.
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Y’know, I object to billionaires on moral principles, but if I was one, I feel like I’d be much more interesting about it.
I would buy an island with a volcano lair and one of those underwater tunnels through a coral reef so I could watch the fish.
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It did not occur to me, because I am naive, that in mentioning that there is a bird with hyper-aggressive males, nurturing males, aggressive females and hyper-nurturing females, that several thousand people would go “wait…are you telling me sparrows invented OMEGAVERSE?!”
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