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The Twitter Mari Lwyd sagas (2019)

So way back in 2019, @seananmcguire and @tkingfisher (and also later @kbspangler) got into a whole poetry/rap battle involving the poor Mari Lwyd (played by Seanan) just trying to get some cheese from Ursula's stores. This went on for a few years, and I can't find transcribed sources, only screenshots.

So, with X/Twitter being What It Is, I wanted a text source to exist. CW for food, alcohol, and all the caps, and full credit to the authors. If you want the original source it's here.

Seanan: WE'RE HERE TO SAY PLEASE WON'T YOU GIVE US SOME CHEESE SOME CHEESE AND SOME BRANDY OR PORT. THIS FESTIVE HORSE SKULL HAS BEEN SHOVED ON A POLE SO GRANT ME YOUR FINEST RETORT.

Ursula: BEGONE WITH YOUR POLE (YOU CAN LEAVE THE NEAT SKULL) DEMANDING MY FOOD IS EXTORTION FOR CHEESE IS QUITE DEAR AND WILL BE WORSE NEXT YEAR AND I CAN’T SPARE YOU EVEN A PORTION

Seanan: IF IT'S HEAD FOR A HEAD, I COULD TAKE YOURS INSTEAD, THAT SEEMS LIKE A TRADE THAT'S QUITE FAIR BUT DECAPITATION REQUIRES CONTEMPLATION, I'D RATHER THAT CHEESE OVER THERE.

Ursula: YOU COME ‘ROUND WITH THE BITS OF A HORSE THAT IS QUITS DEMANDING I GIVE YOU MY CHEDDAR BUT HEY, YOU HAVE SAID, AT LEAST IT’S NOT MY HEAD— I’M SUPPOSED TO THINK THIS IS BETTER!?

Seanan: I AM NOT A QUITTER, NO NEED TO BE BITTER, AND I'D TAKE YOUR GOUDA OR BRIE. YOU ASKED FOR MY HEAD, THINKING THAT SINCE I'M DEAD YOU COULD JUST KIDNAP PIECES OF ME. I HAVE INFINITE TIME AND THE PATIENCE TO RHYME AND I'LL STAND HERE LIMITLESSLY.

Ursula: AND WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT ON NOT-QUITE-LONGEST-NIGHT TO MAKE FREE WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S CHEESES? YOU THINK ‘COS YOU SHOW WITH A WEIRD SKULL IN TOW IT CAN ASK FOR WHATEVER IT PLEASES?

Seanan: THAT'S JUST WHAT I THINK, GIVE ME CHEESE, GIVE ME DRINK, AND I'LL NO MORE CAST DARK ON YOUR DOOR. I'M NO TINSEL OR TREE, I'M CELEBRATORY OF SURVIVAL ON HEATH AND IN MOOR.

Ursula: THERE’S NO HEATH AND NO MOOR BETWEEN HERE AND THE SHORE I COULD MAYBE GET YOU A BOG IN LIEU OF MY BRIE WHICH I’M HOARDING FOR ME WHAT IF—LOOK, SEANAN! A FROG!

Seanan: THAT WAS JUST DIRTY POOL, AND YOU KNOW THERE'S NO RULE THAT SAYS I CAN'T LEAVE AND COME BACK. NOW THERE'S MUD ON MY SHOES I WON'T LET YOU REFUSE THIS FESTIVE DIGESTIVE ATTACK.

Ursula: ALL’S FAIR, SO THEY SAY WHEN CHEESE IS IN PLAY ALTHOUGH I ADMIT TO DECEPTION WHILE YOU CHASED A FROG I SCARFED THAT CHEESE LOG AT PERSONAL COST TO DIGESTION

Seanan: THEN I'LL COME FOR YOUR BOOZE I'M NOT LONGING TO LOSE, AND THIS IS THE HOLIDAY SEASON. I'LL STAND HERE AND SING AS THE MORRIS BELLS RING AND YOUR GUTS CONTEMPLATE CHOOSING TREASON.

Ursula: I’VE NO BRANDY NOR GIN THE SCOTCH STORES ARE THIN BUT OF A SOLUTION I’M THINKIN’ THIS HOUSE’S LIBATION AGAVE’S CREATION WILL NEVERTHELESS GET YOU STINKIN’ IF IT’S BOOZE THAT YOU’RE FOR BONE HORSE FROM THE MOOR IT’S TEQUILA THAT WE WILL BE DRINKIN’

Seanan: WE'LL GET HAMMERED LIKE BOARDS WHEN THE LIQUOR GETS POURED, THEY'LL ASSEMBLE US LIKE WE'RE IKEA. THERE ARE WORSE THINGS TO DO THAN START DRINKING WITH YOU. I'M SO HAPPY THAT I CAME TO SEE YA.

Ursula: I LOVE EVERY ENTITY IN THIS BAR *falls down*

i hate when advanced technology looks streamlined

sorry you're telling me you have all these beautiful pieces, wiring, motors, lights, cameras, wheels, axels, gears, circuit boards, resistors, servos, potentiometers, speakers, buzzers, all this cool-ass fucking shit, working in tandem together, and you wanna hide her inside an edgeless white cube?

do you not understand the poetic power that comes with seeing so many different parts all working together towards a common goal, every single piece of her being spirring to life, each job so simple yet so important to enabling her to speak the words "i love you"???

and you want to hide all that away, as if the sterile cube can love by nature? NO! it's what's inside her that lets her love you idiot!

SHOW IT! let her nature be bared to everyone. show to her that this is a place of joy and acceptance where her insides are free to be outside and nothing is hidden.

...

"Lines Written Hastily on Someone Else's Desk" - a poem written 3/27/2024

I have to sneak into your desk— I've calculated every risk— I have to test out all your pens and blot out with them my chagrins. I have an urge for every ink— for every mark I make I rank the color and the thickness.—In my rainbow correspondent brain this is the peak of knowledge—yes, the summit of my study's bliss. I snoop and steal to these fair ends— my paper keeps exotic winds.

this week on I DONT THINK HE WOULD FUCKING DO THAT: house ramming a car into cuddys house while she has guests

rage form and anti form are so intriguing to me bc sora just regularly gets enveloped in darkness in battle and its just? never addressed in the story?? a game where basically all the game mechanics have an in universe explanation for??? what the fuck

I like to think that if my tumblr pals came to my house, they’d have a good time

sometimes i feel like i missed out on a lot of "italian-ness" bc we stopped going there on a regular basis when i was 9 and i hardly ever saw that side of the family but then i come across a video on youtube titled "southern italians arguing" and it's just a civil (but lively) discussion about a card game the men were in the middle of playing and i'm getting flashes of what it sounds like when my sicilian dad gets real angry and it reminds me of that one time last year when i was working as an intern at a theater (in austria) and one of my tasks was to feed the actors their lines during rehearsals and one time the lead actor came up to me saying "i'm sorry that i'm always so snappy and impatient when i ask for my lines" and i went "this is nothing?? no offense taken"

or this other time, i can't remember if it was at that theater as well or if it was a different context (still in austria) but one time someone got a little loud with me (bc they were irritable and it didn't have anything to do with me or anything that i'd done) and afterwards those who were witnessing the situation were telling me "you do know you don't have to let yourself be treated like that and that you can tell them off, right?" and i was just there like ".......wait i was getting yelled at just now????"

i'm so used to my sicilian dad (and my half-sicilian brother) getting loud at any random minor inconvenience that it for real didn't even register that this person was "yelling" at me for austrian standards, ESPECIALLY since i knew i hadn't done anything wrong and it was all them and their bad mood at the time. and while i did realize that this person wasn't having the best of times in that moment, the fact that they were getting loud at me just simply didn't register. my brain honest to god just went "ah yes this is a completely Normal volume for this level of bad mood, cool cool" and i just kept chilling while everyone around me went "the audacity?? how could they be so rude to you?? are you okay??"

so. wait of the world update. how we feeling about that.

Finally completed my first ship in Starfield that I'm fully happy with.

Doesn't exactly look like the Matrix ships, but say hello to the Nebuchadnezzar!

.

[ nearly got killed by the French today, lads

finally online and thinking about how little will does in every instance we see jane being bullied.     he’s no stranger to how shitty it feels to be singled out like that,  to be berated and belittled,  and yet all he does is stand there and watch,  then try to help pick up the pieces only after it’s over.     i know the suffer brothers have forgotten lonnie byers exists at this point but i unfortunately have not,  and in cases of bullies both at school and at home most of his life,  will never learned how to fight back.     indignance is a fruitless endeavor,  inconsequential to a man like lonnie,  to kids grappling with adult hierarchies on the playground,  to mind flayers prying their way in your head.     anger is even scarier,  something that always made his mom upset and his brother shut down like a machine powered off when it spewed from his dad.

he tries to learn fight instead of flight for the first time ever at 13 years old,  and it just so happens to be in the face of an otherworldly monster.     it’s an atrophied muscle since tantrums as a toddler were answered with intoxicated tantrums of the man of the house,  and it’s never properly gotten the chance to build its strength up,  or even believe it can.     will knows this.     of course he does,  and it’s a contributing factor to his everpresent struggle in not feeling like a burden,  a hassle to have around in his loved ones’ lives,  so he tries to compensate with comfort,  but by nature,  it never feels like enough.     not when the thing about comfort is that it happens after the hurt,  never before,  never prevents it.     standing by when he knows exactly what kind of hurt jane’s feeling,  and doing nothing,  feels like a betrayal.     if he intervened,  it’s not like it would stop it from happening again,  but even trying and failing would be better than nothing.     considering all the times jane has saved his life and his family and friends’ before she even met him,  it is quite literally the least he could do.

but it’s a trauma response,  to freeze.     one built from the crib to the upsidedown,  to lock up or run away.     he’s gotten better at the latter,  but the progress is hard to feel when faced with jane’s misery by himself,  without even the party that always helped him cope with his own bullies at his back.

thinking about toontown worldbuilding from a realistic perspective makes it seem so much darker

for one: what would toontown school realistically teach?

other than "basic stuff" like language and mathematics, I would reckon:

first-aid

juggling lol

climbing, dodging, that sort of stuff?

possibly even something to do with making the gags?

a guide on who the enemy is?

geography class might involve the whole "the shadowy place is the cog HQs and you must not go there until you're older and trained enough to do so"

worldbuilding is wild here. you got explosives and portable giant train sets to run people over with. people that grow crops for food and for the gags (e.g. thrown pies and cakes, bamboo pole for the toon-up), shopkeepers and most likely everyday professions, etc.

so many of these jobs might not even have a close equivalent in real life, and even the closest real-life equivalent might be people that make and sell weapons, since… that's what a lot of gags are…

in other words, I attempt to Worldbuild my way through the backstory fic and now that's not even half a lifetime of trauma, that's arguably a non-stop full lifetime of unending trauma we're talking about here… with this context…

I'd reckon first-aid and toon-up are probably the same for them- and it is one of the first gag tracks a toon can chose to learn!

As for how they learn new gags- in game you do tasks to get tracks of film and when you collect enough you unlock a new gag- you can probably take this a lot of ways like them being shown how to use new tools when they've proven themselves or the idea of classes where they study as you mentioned!

Also that stuff about being taught is pretty spot-on tbh! When you start up the game after making your toon you go through the tutorial where you are taught who the cogs are, what they do, how to fight them, and warned not to let your laff meter reach zero. Again we don't know a whole lot about were toons come from aside from one-off lines and some cog attacks implying they're like living drawings- but it seems as soon as they're able too every toon is taught how to fight back against the seemingly endless threat of cogs- and in a way it can make a nice parallel.

Endlessly manufactured Cogs vs endlessly drawn toons... both sides unable to get a real edge on the other!

Also yes about the shadowy places thing-! So on the streets leading to HQ's there are signs that have a warning on them that you're headed toward a Cog HQ- and unlike the other signs leading to playgrounds the warning signs look very hastily put together and lack the charm and love put into the playground signs- they're very serious in contrast to those!

Also- If you're looking for some more little tidbits their were trading cards released when the original game was still up- the cards all have little descriptions and cover things from gags to cogs to npc toons and have drawings on them as well (some even show toons doing what looks like making gags so you may be on to something there!)- you can find them on the toontown wiki, I think most of them are just kinda silly but maybe you can find something interesting in those ^_^