Book Review: Cockatiel x Chameleon
This work features quite a few sequences of transcribed fetish porn. If that didn't turn you away, after you've read the story, read this.
History is ended.1
Or so thought Bavitz, internationally read author of Modern Cannibals, Fargo and Chicago, (internationally) read exclusively by the terminally online, Homestuck, and Madoka Magica fans2. All have failed to make him any money as a writer on fanfiction dot net and recently archive of our own dot org.
In fact, does any internet artist make any money? Is the Patreon scene worth it? Even if you’re rich from it, does that make up for the baggage of insane people after your clout? Is it worth it for the less insane to follow you? Aren’t they bound to initially admire you for your art, then get drawn into your baggage, or worse, into a community of people who obsessively consume internet art?3
Let’s ignore money. If you even get fame as a queer writer, and then choose to write something messy,4 people will clutch their pearls and speak against it, both the allies ostensibly for your rights and the people against them. If you write milquetoast Calarts-style5 cartoons, you will be rightfully called out as a sellout.
Speaking of cartoons, anime and anything the Internet-poisoned6 focuses on, are they the center of a new culture, or merely trash that people elevate in their heads to give their wasteful lives meaning? Is all art that?
Cockatiel x Chameleon is about all these themes in a nutshell. I know, I’m pretty good, it took Bavitz 150,000 words to say that. Here’s a quote:
"No, Van Der Gramme, you are pathetic in the truest sense: Irrelevancy. You live in a hole. A tiny hole shaped to the exact contours of your body, into which you have managed to drag a handful of followers to shape them into a you-shape too—but it is only a hole. It is dark, it is small, and in the end it is lonely because the only people in that hole match your shape exactly; they are simply extensions of you."
"I have over a hundred thousand followers—"
"I am nearing one million and my show has not even aired. And my million are not cowering but bellowing my name from the rooftops, they are writing essays on my work not in the far-flung corners of Rule34 or Danbooru but on the most well-regarded media websites and legitimate sources of news. I am regaled as a pioneer, a hero, an inspiration, and you are nothing, you are unknown, and you are lucky you are unknown because if they ever dragged you kicking and screaming out of your hole into the light you would disintegrate like the screeching, immature, prepubescent vampire you are, you would be an object of disgust to the same people eagerly counting down the—60—remaining seconds until my first episode begins, you would be considered a creature worthy only of censure and cancellation, and not a single one of them would see the dreck you create as art. You would be an obscenity. In your hole you can suck the blood of enough followers to sustain yourself. In your hole you are safe. In your hole you can say 'I am the best' and nobody doubts you because they are your shape. It is a hole made only for you and you have deluded yourself into believing that hole spans the entire breadth of the world. Well, Van Der Gramme, it has taken a long time and a lot of effort and self-reflection and rehabilitation but I have clawed my way out of your hole and I now see the world for what it truly is and I, Mimmy Wowzers, am rising forth in that world unfettered by the narrow confines of my own body, free to be not myself, but an idol, elevated above them, those masses who have cast you out of their sight to the mutual benefit of both you and them. How can you be the best, Van Der Gramme, when I am the one they celebrate, when I am the one they revere?"
Wait, it’s also about the plight of African American people. Somehow.
Quick Rundown
An autistic technical writer who’s lost her purpose in life, Harper Praise7 stumbles into an erotic roleplay with a pretentious porn artist, becomes enamored with him, and begins using the Discord channel he often frequents, discovering the world of Internet “culture”, anime pedophiles and vore furries along the way. Her life, unrelatedly, starts falling apart around her.
The pretentious porn artist, Van Der Gramme,8 has his own drama going on, a falling-out with another porn artist who’s about to release a children’s cartoon for Disney Channel. Gramme also needs to support his hanger-ons, including anime pedophile Somebody’s Little Sister, and Two Black Men,9 as his Patreon savings dwindle from too much drug use and generally poor financial management.10
The Disney Channel showrunner, Mimmy Wowzers,11 has her own drama going on, suffering the spotlight as the First Trans Disney Show Runner, dealing with censors and toxic fans, including buddies of the pretentious artist and a Björk Stalker-type person.
The viewpoints repeatedly draw apart, come together and intermingle in a mesh of themes like loneliness, office scrum mastery, the genuineness and morals of art, fandom, the LGBT empyrean, what the internet wants LGBT people to be, and furries ruining all good things. Almost every chapter has a cool piece of “real” art at the start that relates to it.12 The conclusion takes place during the George Floyd riots, and I don’t just mean it happens at the same time.
What stands out
The World Wide Web, faithfully represented
Ever since 2015, whenever writers have attempted to portray the modern Internet, they’ve kind of fallen on their faces. The most obvious recent case is Andrew Hussie’s Psycholonials, wherein the entire plot hinged on a terrorist murdering people live on Instagram and not getting banned from the website.
In Cockatiel, every event that takes place on the Internet is so plausible, I can bring up actual real-life examples for them all. For example, not only do pedophilic furries stay unbanned on Discord, they get hired by the company as lead community managers.
Perhaps the biggest difference to mainstream Internet-heavy works is that, at one point, a death at the center of the plot is brought up around normies,13 and nobody gives a shit, because it’s internet garbage and normies will never ever care. The Northern Caves14 and other good stories always know that the Internet is very important, but not personally important to everyone.
The World Wide Web, fancifully represented
While the Internet is the Internet we know and love, we also see it from Harper and Gramme’s fanciful perspectives, interpreted as real events. Avatars become characters, textual drama gets physical. And despite how cringeworthy that sounds, it’s beautiful instead:
Only one door remained. Smoking Room, its plaque read. Unlike the others, which shifted décor and even dimension freely as to the needs of each individual, this room matched the aesthetic of the corridor and the lobby. It was clearly an area set aside for relaxation and socializing, organized around a chic central coffee table the shape of a scalene triangle. A vast plane of windows consumed its far wall and beyond those windows only space watched back, a colorful and bright space where galaxies swirled.
Its occupant was a girl about ten or twelve in a nauseatingly frilly pink dress, divorced from the fetters of era in its style, or at least beyond Harper's limited sartorial literacy. Ribbons and ribbons and ribbons, embroidery and ribbons, and ribbons, and ribbons, and a hat reminiscent of a beret from which a clutch of fashionable feathers protruded. Legs crossed, one gloved palm pressed against the cushion of her divan, tiny foot tap-tap-tapping the languid air. Between two fingers she clutched the neck of a glass from which she sipped red wine, eyes shut, smug smile. A little tongue flicked out and licked the wine from her lips which parted to reveal two long, sharp fangs.
[…]
"I exist," said Van Der Gramme.
His manifestation surprised them all, like the blast of a shotgun, even though he spoke with neither pomp nor circumstance and appeared without even a flourish. One moment not there, the next there, exactly the same as the profile picture on his social media accounts: shaggy tufts of black beard and sideburns, massive sunglasses that reflected a something (a wall, covered in posters, but not any wall belonging to the current room), and a long gray robe tied by a sash. He appeared already moving and as he moved leaned slightly sideways and snagged a half-empty bottle of wine by the neck, from which he swigged without pouring. His fingers flicked and a cigar appeared in his hand, already lit, and with the cigar's existence emerged the existence of an ashen scent like the one in Papimon's car. He drank, he smoked, he turned and fell blindly backward onto an armchair, one of an endless array of chairs in this room.
Harper opened her mouth to speak but the sound caught in her throat. Somebody's Little Sister spoke instead. "Good you're here Gramme. I'm fucking, nine-nine-point-nine percent sure this guy's a minor. Ban?"
It was impossible to tell where Van Der Gramme looked because his glasses revealed only a different room and cigar smoke enshrouded his face. But he had to look at her, Harper even stepped toward him wringing her wrists, and he had to see her name—Alchemist—and know her. And then he would say, "I know you." And from there...
Okay, maybe it’s a little cringeworthy, but in a purposeful way. Shout-out to the segments inspired by this video.
He knew it was awful. Believe him. Please believe him, everyone. Please forgive him for doing something so awful because he knew all along it was awful. Final aegis of the hack artist—"Bad on purpose."
The terminally online personalities
This ties into the previous point. We’ve all met people like:
Van der Gramme: internet figure with a cult-like15 following of weirdos that don’t actually care about his art at all, just the clout and the community.
Somebody’s Little Sister: grown man with a little anime girl avatar, who spams slurs and crime statistics. He will never be redeemed in a trillion years, no matter his allegedly tragic backstory.
Mimmy Wowzers: porn artist who’s attempted to scour her terrible fetish porn past from the internet and now is inexplicably working for big normie cartoon companies. The only people that seem to want this shift also seem to weirdly care more about her LGBT identity than the content of her artistic work.
Harper: “serious" technically-internationally-published writer that conveniently finds an excuse for writing many extracts of fetish porn. Wait no, that’s the author of this novel.16
Cariscresco: furry obsessed with their weird fetish, who ruins every single fucking conversation instantly, forces people into roleplay and threatens suicide when not given enough attention. I think I’ve met more furries that are like this than ones that aren’t.
Homestuck attempted this gimmick with the trolls, but eventually went too far. Bavitz and Hussie permanently captured a slice of the Internet and its personalities in amber, timeless and unaging yet immediately recognizable to all. By doing that, he’s proven history isn’t ended.
The regular personalities
Unlike Homestuck, though, Cockatiel x Chameleon doesn’t shy away from having archetypically real characters. We have:
Mark: That One Old Guy at the Office who won’t shut up, keeps trying to make you eat his food. Tells the same stories over and over. Cares strongly about George Floyd. Wait, maybe that’s not an archetype.
Royce: Silicon Valley, taken human form.
Papimon: female site wizard from Thailand—
Okay I haven’t met any of these people in real life. They’re really good characters though, and my point is that this story doesn’t focus on the online world exclusively at the cost of everything else. It helps contrast Harper’s real life with her virtual one, and I’m sure we wouldn’t be able to find this guy on the Internet anyway (maybe Facebook?):
"Miss Papimon is always so, what's the word, reticent. Hardly ever speaks. Hopefully you'll be able to open her up. It's tough coming from another country. I myself came from Rhodesia—well, they call it Zimbabwe nowadays, I always forget"—he made a foolish face—"and I remember it was quite lonely the first few years until I sorted things out. Of course I had the benefit of speaking the language. Perhaps Miss Papimon isn't confident in her English?"
"No, her English is good."
"Oh, excellent." Mark nodded and stared at Harper's blank whiteboard, at her empty shelves and bare walls. "You ever given thought to decorating? It's quite gloomy in here. Perhaps a few potted plants. Actually I just received some excellent prints of just the most beautiful drone imagery. Do you know of the Sundarbans? In Bangladesh and India? A vast mangrove forest at the delta of the Ganges. So many tiny rivers and tributaries, and the groves themselves, at least as far as the imagery is concerned, are simply gorgeous. Gorgeous! They use infrared bands, do you know about infrared bands?"
Harper wrote documentation for a company that specialized in remote sensing. "Yes."
Any of these characters could be your favorite, honestly.
Bavitz has finally understood the line between poetic and opaque
Modern Cannibals was the biggest offender of this, and you should skip this point if you haven’t read that yet, because I do recommend it. Here’s an excerpt from the climactic showdown between the protagonists and the antagonist:
Graves staggered toward [Cal] directly into an uppercut to the jaw.
The jaw came off. It bounced across a tabletop and flipped into the fallen podium, leaving behind a trail of blood drops. An unhinged gory mess dangled down Graves's throat.
"Are you even a person." Cal rubbed his knuckle. "Do you even exist?"
From Graves's ruined face uttered a voice: Cal's voice. "I need to go to Los Angeles. I have an opportunity. Why have I stayed behind for someone who spurns my aid? It's useless, pointless."
"Nice mimicry," said Cal, "But I think you have my inner voice all wrong. I don't sound like that." He advanced toward Graves.
[…]
Z. barreled at him, she didn't know what she was doing but she held the box cutter in her hand somehow, she had seen what had happened to Kiki but if there was one place on Graves's body one weakpoint she knew what it was what it had to be—
She drove the box cutter into the kelpie on Graves's back.
He dropped onto his knees. Z. staggered back and left the box cutter stuck in him, the handle wobbled as Graves tilted inward and pressed his forehead against the soggy carpet, like the position of a Muslim prayer, pointed toward Cal. Cal clutched his bleeding side and with Cecily's help pushed to his feet.
"Who... Who was..." Then Cal shook his head. "Kiki, gotta save Kiki." He took a step toward her.
Mitchum Graves's body melted. It dissolved into an orange mush that held the form of Mitchum Graves for a brief moment before it collapsed entirely.
Then the floor under where Graves had fallen began to cave inward. It sank, tugging the surrounding carpet along with it, like a giant sinkhole. Nearby tables rattled and started to move.
"What is this, what's happening?" said Cecily. Nobody knew what was happening. Nobody ever knew.
The sinkhole grew, large swaths of the floor fell into an empty black void. Chairs and tables leaned, then toppled in. Cecily and Z. stepped away.
"We have to get out of here," said Cal, who staggered along a deepening incline toward Kiki. He scooped her up in his arms and started to climb toward the top of the depression, although he was already halfway down it. On the side, opposite Z. and Cecily, Red!Maximillion rolled into the void.
Z. and Cecily kept backing up, until they were pressed against the wall. Z. glanced to the side, they were near the roof access door. The depression continued to grow, it spanned the width of the room, there was no possible way back to the elevator.
"Kiki," she said. "Cal!"
Cal and Kiki had vanished. Cecily clutched Z. tight and trembled. Below opened a vast, bottomless pit.
[…]
The pit continued to expand. Z. and Cecily stood with their backs against the roof access door. Cal and Kiki seemed an infinitely far distance away.
[…]
The blue sky yawned above her as she tromped up the final steps onto the rooftop platform. It bent atop the city in the shape of a boomerang, lined by a waist-high fence. In every direction the towers rose from the murk, spires and obelisks. A wind rustled across the golden pavilion, her hair flapped around her ears and face. Cecily trudged behind her and leaned against her back. Her arms laced with Z.'s. Ahead of them, standing on the roof with his glasses awash in white light, stood Andrew Hussie.
[…]
Everything seemed unreal, like had neither of them heard the insanity on the floor below? Did the stuff on the floor below even happen? No, it couldn't have. It couldn't be real, she must have imagined it. Z. realized this was it, this was her opportunity, this was why she stole the hard drive in the first place. This was real, everything below was fake. That had been Graves, this was Hussie.
Ignoring the kelpie symbolizing fakeness, and Graves being a “fake” while Hussie is “real”, the above scene is basically nonsense even if you know the characters, being composed of disconnected paragraphs independently trying to be deep.
It tries to merge a realistic action scene—people fighting with improvised weapons against a sleazy lunatic in a hotel room—with a completely fantastical death of cause-and-effect. The villain only dies if the main character strikes directly at the symbolism! This is the kind of thing that sounds good in your draft, then readers see it and hate it. It’s hard to follow (harder than the quote—I cut some of the cruft out in the interests of your sanity), faster paced than it needs to be, and it doesn’t reward the reader in any way.
I know what you’re thinking, review reader strawman, “m-muh magical realism!”, but Modern Cannibals isn’t even that. In fact, I can quote Bavitz in the most open-and-shut case of all time: “I hate magical realism”.17
Nevertheless, still a great story.18
But I digress. Let’s take a look at Cockatiel x Chameleon:
"You are threatening the peace and are a danger to the people of this city," Dogshit continued. "You—"
One of the soldiers pointed his rifle at Dogshit. "I heard enough. On the ground, scumbag."
"You are the sewage clogging the—"
"I SAID ON THE GROUND."
"Clogging the—"
The soldier fired his rifle into the sky. It sounded less real than guns from Hollywood movies.
Dogshit flinched. Recovered. "Clogging the—"
"NOT WARNING YOU AGAIN COCKSUCKER. ON THE GROUND." All six soldiers, including the one who kept Graham pinned, pointed their rifles at Dogshit.
"Clogging the—"
A firework went off. None had erupted in a long time, but maybe some rioter beyond the fog heard the gunfire and thought it was someone else's firework and decided to light theirs in solidarity. The why didn't matter―it went off. The soldiers in unison jerked their heads toward the sound and each looked in a different direction.
Dogshit flicked back his overcoat, wrenched his Magnum out of its holster, and fired while diving toward the cover of some debris left by the rioters, amalgamated junk so eclectic as to be rendered perfectly meaningless. Everything about Dogshit's movement looked spectacular. Straight from an action film, straight from a Greek sculpture, the coat fluttering to reveal Dogshit's powerfully-built body bulging through his yellow polo. Olympian. Ideal of man, ignore his short stature. And the power of his arms and pectoral muscles only accentuated the power of a more modern sensibility, his long and exquisitely-crafted handgun, which captured the eye's attention through its metallic glint on a parabola downward.
Yet the bullet hit absolutely nothing. Its sound split the white smoke clean in two, until the smoke regenerated with wispy tendrils.
As Dogshit landed hard a few feet away from his intended cover, the soldiers whirled like puppets, erratic swivels in semicircular patterns entirely desynced with one another. "Hostiles! We got hostiles?" one shouted, in character, but unhelpful. None of them could pinpoint where the gunfire came from, none of them even bothered looking for Dogshit after he hurriedly scrambled behind the pile of junk. Like toddlers, or the Alchemist, none of them remembered his presence.
"Hostiles hostiles," another soldier pitched in. "Hot and heavy let's roll out." Inhuman string of words, past comprehension. The soldiers rumbled together toward their vehicle. Graham was released and, shivering, started to rise―but Fletch remained trapped in the truck, howling for Dogshit to stop.
Dogshit didn't stop. Like a meercat he popped above the junk pile and fired again. Despite the gun's obscene size and caliber it went off like a toy, a pow rendered diminutive within the oppressive white smoke of the tear gas.
I don’t want to spoil the actual best action scene in this novel, but the above is a perfect example of the author walking on the knife’s edge between pretentious, hazy purple prose and say, Worm’s Wildbow’s down-to-earth “practical” writing.19 It’s easy to tell what’s going on, it’s fun to read, it relies on established events and character traits over symbolism. It’s grounded. In Modern Cannibals, the narration was almost afraid of explaining things to the reader, and when it did, the characters themselves had to internally voice justifications. In this novel, the narration is not afraid of saying things twice, not afraid of slowing down the pace, and rewards the reader with nice prose at the same time.
They sat there, scrumlings without their scrum master, bathed under the sterile fluorescence of the rectangular light from above.
Alternatively I’m cherrypicking quotes and it’s all a personal je ne sais quoi. To sum it up: I suddenly understand everything.
Dodging pornographic red flags
I don’t really want to copypaste porn, so I’ll be brief: many popular web novels feature porn segments that universally alternate between a blatant conduit for the author’s fetish, and boring and irrelevant to the story. Often both.
Cockatiel x Chameleon makes sure every single sex scene20 is either an important character interaction, vital as story events, or entertaining. At no point did I sense that the author was getting off on any of it, which is comforting. I’d say it’s like I’m reading a real book, but “real authors” don’t exactly have the best track record.
What I didn’t like
Overreliance on Harper
Harper is a pretty relatable main character,21 but Bavitz learns on her far, far too often. She’s too passive and this isn’t actually an isekai harem anime, your audience demands growth and interaction. However, outside of her own mind, she’s a bystander getting bounced off multiple weird people that force themselves into their life.
This culminates with the death of one of those characters. But that wasn’t enough for Bavitz, and she also has her friend abandon her in a much later scene. It doesn’t help that a huge amount of screentime is dedicated to the second character, and that the circumstances make it a way less important event, both to the reader and to our… main character? I’m pretty sure she has most of the chapters and words, but Gramme, and even lesser characters like Sister and Mimmy take over the story, welcomedly.
It’s not like Harper is a bad character. She was just overused, recipient of too many plot events, and she’s not strong enough to sustain that weight, not in a story with so, so many colorful side characters.
Royce has too much screentime
Royce reminds me the most of Maximillion, a character in Bavitz’s previous novel Modern Cannibals. They’re both outwardly successful and competent people, until they start running their mouth and you realize they have no idea what they’re talking about, a nearly contentless but continuous drivel of mixed metaphor. In Royce’s case, it’s less about being an agent of someone famous and more about mildly philosophical Youtube video essays that people watch when high.
Unfortunately, he has less of an effect in a story where nearly everyone talks at each other, a self absorbed ensemble of the less-neurally-typical. He’s a character-of-none in a story that can barely handle the breadth of personalities it already has.
I’m unsure what, if anything he’s meant to do for the book. What the themes have to do with him. I feel like Papimon was more than enough to fill both her role and his, but I guess the author really wanted to make fun of Californian woo artificial intelligence nerds, or rationalists? No clue, but he’s a character that won’t stick with me, which is unique in this novel.
Let me amend that, maybe his whole purpose is to not care about George Floyd in that one scene? That does sound like something in Bavitz’s intentional design. Just give him less screentime, less of a personal tie to Harper.
The title is terrible
Okay, I don’t care that much about this, but it’s kind of a shitty title. Cockatiel x Chameleon. A pain to write, a pain to think, the ties to the story are forced via in-story reference (bravo, Nolan!). It does evoke bad romance fiction, but many other titles would.
We can blame Paulo Coelho for stealing the obvious replacement. That fucker.
And now, the conclusion
That’s a smaller “What I didn’t like” section than usual. I didn’t even call it a “What I hated “ section.
It was legitimately all good, even the bad I’d call at worst unnecessary. Editing this book would only involve taking things out. I have to reach not to call this a masterpiece, so I’ll just call it a masterpiece and present a meaningless score:
9.7/10 - That’s right, I’m bringing out the decimals for this one.
Cockatiel x Chameleon is available at Archive Of Our Own, for free. Like and subscribe, lest Bavitz be forced to write commissions.
This work was written right before the Russia/Ukraine war or World War 3, whatever it is by the time you read this.
But I repeat myself.
I mean, it doesn’t even have to be porn, every single internet artist I’ve met has been absolutely deranged. You’d have to be to choose that as a career. Learn to code, kids, and you’ll land a cushy job like Site Wizard.
But like, messy for real. I’ve noticed a recent trend with terrible Twitter writers that claim their art is politically threatening to soothe their egos, when really it’s just fucking terrible, the true reason even allies dislike it.
2D artstyle most recently seen in the relevantly Disney movie Turning Red, somehow. Also, here’s an article calling me racist for using the term.
Term coined by Andrew Hussie, inasmuch as you can coin a term by spamming it.
A probable stand-in for the author, minus or plus autism.
Kind of a stand-in for edgy porn artists like Shadman, though his harsher edges like pedophilia got pushed into Sister, a member of his posse. While writing this, I saw the artist mention Digibro, a druggie creator that’s a much better fit (click the link for an explanation of who they were). Of course, none of these characters are exactly what they’re inspired by, there are multiple inspirations.
Also, while researching Digibro I found this absolutely hilarious myanimelist thread. You’ll think it’s 2007 while you’re reading it, and then you’ll look at the date.
Stand ins for anarcho-communist drug dealers and people getting degrees in Psychology or Medicine, character archetypes so easily forgotten.
I love how the basic conceit includes the porn artist refusing to draw furry porn, because otherwise Bavitz couldn't make him have money troubles. Furry porn artists are the aristocracy (artistocracy?) of the Web, only second to Furry tech people, who commission the former. 80% of American dollars have traces of cocaine on them, but some crimes leave no trace.
A definite stand-in for Vivziepop, though her cisser edges like being cis got pushed into other cis characters, being trans herself. And her story as a showrunner is reminiscent of those of Legend of Korra and Steven Universe. The real Vivzie was smart to seek anti-censorship networks from the start. Similarly to my footnote about Gramme, it’s likely Digibro’s girlfriend also partially inspired her.
This is the only time art historians will ever be useful. If you know one, you can ask them what Bavitz meant by this.
If you don’t know what a normie is, you’re one.
Okay, in this case it was after a massive bait and switch and left a bad taste in my mouth.
I don’t really like either CxC or Psycholonials using the term “cult” to refer to author-focused Internet communities. I think a cult is a very precise thing, they intentionally remove people’s support structure, are usually built around ultimate purposes, but really it’s all about money, enforce absolute secrecy, etc. They are faker religions (I know of course that if you go to Google and search “cult definition” you’ll get “a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing”. Google is fucking wrong).
In CxC, the cult leader is draining his own funds to help his “followers”. He’s otherwise a self absorbed weirdo, and his “followers” don’t seem to actually care about the “religion” that would enable an actual cult comparison. They don’t really have anything in common.
Ultimately, I think people really hate Twitter and Facebook, and are grasping at straws to put why into words. The English language isn’t ready, though. We just need a big internet “““cult””” situation to go mainstream and then we can use the proper noun, like we did with the Streissand Effect.
Bavitz very obviously writes from his own experience, but I find the segment below hilarious, because it means that he himself never figured out the Ctrl+Backspace shortcut. Her Google-fu is also awful and she doesn’t know how to use quotes to specify perfect matches, too. The truly terminally online would know both these things. Also she puts her laptop between her legs? Deranged.
"Yeah," Harper typed in stunned automation before she remembered herself, mashed backspace, and instead wrote "Certainly."
#smoking-room, The Consortium, Discord, May 3rd, 2020, 07:16 AM GMT+0.
I choose to count this as my Modern Cannibals review to justify not cutting the quote out.
Which I still like, or liked, but will pretend to dislike for the purpose of the comparison. Maybe an actually terrible example would be Micro Gates, but I’m the only person who’s read that.
If I remember correctly, there are only two to three actual sex scenes in the book depending on how you count them, but around ten scenes of people staring at computer screens and roleplaying smut.
We’ve all, at one point in our lives, done some soulless job that, despite paying money or furthering our careers, seemed to offer no good purpose to society or our personal growth in any way whatsoever. Thankfully I choose to consume fiction about weird porn instead of consuming weird porn, or worse, producing metafiction about weird porn.